Dogma Read Online Free PDF Page B

me, and explain me to our fellow conference-goers.
    Ostracism, that’s what I’ve brought him, W. says. Derision. Every door that was open to him is now closed. The shutters have been slammed on the windows, and W.’s out in the cold, stamping his feet for warmth. And there I am beside him.
    What do I want from him?, W. asks. What does he want from himself? Ah, there’s no way of telling. He’ll simply have to follow where I lead, and listen to what I say. We’re heading out, out into the wilderness, he knows that. Out beneath the flashing stars and the silvery pines, to where nothing can survive.

 
    How is it that our idiocy still surprises us?, W. wonders. Is it that we still harbour the hope of overcoming our idiocy?
    Who allowed it? Who raised our aspirations to the sky? We want to blame someone. It must be someone else’s fault. Our horizons were opened too widely. We saw too much … But who let us see? Who left the doorway open?
    Suicide by Cop , W. reads a newspaper headline. What of suicide by philosophy?, he says. What of the attempt to incite murder through the extent of one’s stupidity? Because that’s the only way he can account for us, the shortcomings of our thought. It’s the only way he can account for our persistent attempt to think.
    There’s something entirely lacking in us, W. says, although he’s not quite sure what it is. Shame—is that the word? Anyone else would have stopped doing what we do.
    There’s a short story by Kafka, a fragment really, W. says. A man in a great hurry gets lost on the way to thestation and asks a policeman for directions. Gibt sie auf! , says the policeman, Give it up! That’s what we should do, says W. Give it up!

 
    W. never likes to be too far from bodies of water. When he visits me, he always demands to be taken to the sea. And he always takes me directly to the sea, when I visit him. ‘ I’ll meet you at the sea ’, he texts me, when I tell him I’ve arrived. I have to go straight there, straight from the airport to the sea to meet him.
    And now, in the middle of America, when the sea’s so far away? We feel drawn to the Mississippi. One of the blue-capped tourist guides points the way. Down Beale Street, cross the road …
    We stand by the roadside, trying to figure out how to get across. Cars pass in an endless stream. Lorries, buses, without a break.
    We’ll have to run, I tell W. Run! We run, just making the other side. But Sal’s been left behind. There she is, waving to us. There’s nothing we can do, W. says. She’s lost! She’ll never make it! We’ll have to go on without her.
    Still one more road to cross. We follow the same technique: a headlong rushing, closing our eyes as we run. We’re madmen! Sal, meanwhile, has found a button you can push to get the traffic lights working. She crosses calmly. Why didn’twe work that out? She crosses the second street.—‘You twats’, she says, ‘why did you leave me behind?’
    The Mississippi: more than half a mile wide.—‘I think that the river is a strong brown god ’, W. says, quoting Eliot. ‘ Keeping his reasons and rages, destroyer, reminder/ Of what men choose to forget … ’
    Destroyer indeed. Periodically, the Mississippi breaks the levees and floods the river bottoms where the poor live and work, W. says. That’s what happened in the great flood of ’27. A million people were displaced. Whole towns were engulfed …
    They made the poor blacks pay for their aid, of course. And if they couldn’t pay? They were confined in work camps, and made to do forced labour …
    W. presses an earbud into my ear and an earbud into his. We listen to the deep blues of the Delta. Tommy Johnson. Big Joe Williams. We listen to pulsating grooves, barely songs, with no distinct beginning or end, and to verses that speak of turbulence and dislocation, of rootlessness and violent death, of the great flood of ’27 and the great drought of ’29.
    It’s the music of life , W. says. Of