Dogma by Lars Iyer

gold.
    Is that what it was like in the Age of Gold?, we wonder. Is that what it was like for all creatures, basking together in the sun? And will that time come again, when humankind and its brother and sister creatures will each be an image of the Goddess?
    Is that what’s going to happen to my flat?, W. wonders. Will it become a Hindu temple?

 
    Plymouth. Dinner time. W. is a systematic cook. On weekend mornings, he goes through his Sainsbury’s magazines deciding what to cook that evening. Then he goes to the supermarket to buy his ingredients, before preparing dinner with meticulousness and love.
    He loves to cook, W. says, and enjoys anticipating a good meal. He savours his anticipation. He’s not like me, W. says, who eats only discount sandwiches that go cheap after their sell-by date. He doesn’t march round Eldon Square just before closing time in search of a bargain sandwich or a box of salad for 75p.
    W. knows the value of deferred gratification, he says, which I do not.—‘As soon as you feel any pang of hunger, you have to feed yourself’, W. notes. In fact, W. is not sure I’ve ever felt a pang of hunger.—‘It’s an addiction with you, isn’t it? If you don’t eat every hour on the hour, you get panicky. You have to have something in your mouth’.
    He can see I’m hungry, W. says.—‘Go on, go and get a slab of beer. Go and get your pork scratchings’.
    We speak of our absent friends, over beers. Where are they now? Scattered all over the world! If only they were closer! Of what would we be capable? They would make us great!
    Perhaps that is his last temptation, W. says, the thought that something could make us great.
    When did it begin, W.’s exalted view of friendship? When did he receive his great vision of comradeship? At his grandmother’s caravan park, he says, as a child. His parents sent him there every summer. He would stay for weeks at a time, playing in the fields by the sea.
    It reminded W. of the Canadian wilderness that he had left behind. It reminded him of what he had lost: the breadth of the sky, the virgin earth, and whole days of wandering, with no parents to supervise him. Children should be brought up with benign neglect : isn’t that what W. has always maintained?
    W. made a friend at the caravan park, a friend of the kind you might make in Canada, W. says. A working class friend, like me. Except utterly unlike me, because his friend had a sense of loyalty. His friend knew nothing of betrayal! Nothing of treachery!
    Open space is good for friendship, W. says. Friendship needs expanses, he says. It needs to fill its lungs. His friend and he looked for adders in the woods, and toads in the marshland at the edge of the dunes. They trespassed on farmland, too, smoking among the hay-bales.
    They were chased by farmers, and ran back to the caravanpark through the fields. Once, they saw a police car, pulling up the park drive, and knew they were in trouble.
    But there was no betrayal. When one stumbled, the other helped him up. When one fell, the other carried him. When one was accused, the other would take the blame … It was like Spartacus , W. says. The cadre was everything. The collective. And hasn’t that been what he’s sought ever since?
    If there were a few more of us …, W. says. A few more, living close to us, helping one another think. Helping us, even us. If I lived closer, W. says, instead of hundreds of miles away, something might be possible. We’re islands, he says, stranded at opposite ends of the country.
    W. dreams, like Phaedrus, of an army of thinker-friends, thinker-lovers. He dreams of a thought-army, a thought-pack, which would storm the philosophical Houses of Parliament. He dreams of Tartars from the philosophical steppes, of thought-barbarians, thought-outsiders. What distances would shine in their eyes!

 
    Sal is always moved by my response to dinner. A cooked meal! I’m amazed. A whole chicken, steaming on the table! I become quite