Dogma by Lars Iyer Read Free Book Online Page B

horror all around us. We both see chaos and degradation, greed and conflict. But it doesn’t touch me, not really. Even our age, the worst of all, will see the birth of another of God’s avatars, I have that consolation.
    He’s alone, W. says. Alone with his despair. But he has the Messiah!, I tell him. Ah, but the Messiah is very different from Kalkin, W. says.—‘Besides, messianism is best understood in terms of time , not some idiot on a horse’. He’ll explain that to me another day, he says.

 
    Whitley Bay, walking between the boarded up sea-front buildings. Something has finished here, we agree. Something is over. But at least they haven’t begun the regeneration yet. They’re going to turn it into a cultural quarter . Imagine that! A cultural quarter , where there was once the funfair and the golden sands.
    It was the same in the city. W. was unimpressed by the regeneration of the quayside, with its so-called public art . Public art is invariably a form of marketing for property development, he says. It’s inevitably the forerunner of gentrification.
    W. is an enemy of art. We ought to fine artists rather than subsidise them, he says. They ought to be subject to systematic purges. He’s never doubted we need some kind of Cultural Revolution.
    The real art of the city is industrial , of course, W. says. Spiller’s Wharf. The High Bridge. The four storeys of the flax mill in the Ouseburn Valley …
    W. likes to imagine the people of the city, the old working class, coming to reclaim the quayside. What need did anchor-smiths and salt-panners have for a cultural quarter ? Whycan’t the descendants of the keelmen, of the rope-makers and wagon-drivers, come and retake the new ghettoes for the rich ? In his imagination, W. says, a great army of Geordies storm along the river, smashing the public art and tearing down the new buildings.
    A search and rescue helicopter hovers over the sea. Someone must have gone missing. Someone must have disappeared. As we draw closer, we see an ambulance on the beach, and bodysuited lifeguards running into the water, with floats.
    We gather with other spectators along the railings of the promenade. A second helicopter has joined the search, following the edge of the shore where the sand gives way to rock. The currents must be very strong, we surmise. You never know where a body might wash up. A teenage boy, head in hands, sits on the steps of the ambulance with a towel around his shoulders.
    The whirling blades of the helicopter leave a shadowy impression on the sea. Beneath it, the lifeguards spread out over a few hundred meters, paddling out on their floats. Sometimes they dive and then reappear. Much higher up, rising at an angle, the second helicopter surveys the whole area. Maybe it has special equipment, a kind of sonar, we speculate.
    Two men run onto the beach and take off their clothes. They’re drunk. They splash out into the sea, nude, laughing and shouting, the helicopters hovering above them. But when they turn and see the long line of spectators, they becomesuddenly embarrassed. Shamed, they wade back to the beach, hands cupped over their genitals.
    W., doleful as we head back to the station. How much time do we have left?, he wonders. A decade? A century? The trouble is, you can’t tell, he says. The conditions for the disaster are here, they’re omnipresent, but when will it actually come?
    He reads book after book on the destruction of the world. Book after book on the apocalypse. He reads about the futures market. He reads about storm-surges and dry-belts. Then he reads my books, W. says, shaking his head.—‘Your books! My God!’ The conditions for the end are here, W. says, but not the end itself, not yet …

 
    W. is greatly susceptible to changes in weather, he says on the phone. He can feel them coming days in advance, he says of the Westerlies that bombard his city. He knows there’s a low front out over the Atlantic, ready to hit the foot of