DOGMA

It does no good to let a few days go unmarked, I tell myself, so I should write something, even if it is to say very little. September, and I have just seen the first Daddy Long Legs, creatures of the threshold, Handke would say, which makes me see them as little omens rather than little irritants. And a mosquito, too, hovering in the air. Storms tonight. I was stranded in the office by the rain, but I watched the lightning over the buildings in the distance. Magnificent!

Hard work, day by day. Most nights out, rare nights in, no longer light at eleven or ten o clock; eight-thirty sees the night. We spend our last evenings of the summer at the Free Trade, looking out over the river. We lived in the pubs of the Ouseburn valley this summer; soon everything will change, and we will say, ‘that was a great summer’, or ‘that was the summer when we went out every night’.

I’ve been editing the categories here at the blog in downtime. How much nonsense I’ve written! I’ve cut hundreds of posts, but left hundreds more – so short, almost charming and so unlike what I write now. I passed my hundred thousandth page view the other day – no doubt because of the Celebrity category, which was only the first part of an attempt to rewrite the Heideggerian fourfold, you know the one, earth, world, gods, mortals. I had it in mind to do my own ‘Feldweg‘, too, set in Bracknell of course, then Zarathustra in Slough.

Conferences coming up. Weeks of work on papers, written and rewritten and no doubt overwritten, ultra-dense and writerly rather than open and accessible. I tried to concentrate all I’ve written on the everyday and on literature into a 4,000 paper and to write without using proper names or quoting, according to our DOGMA rules (DOGMA should be written in capitals, says W., laughing). What were those rules (made up in imitation of the Danish film group, or as a version of OULIPO, writing under constraint, or was it reading Flusser that gave us the idea)?

All I can remember: 1) Only one proper name; 2) No quotations – no textual commentary; 3) It must be ridden with pathos; 4) You can’t tell anyone about DOGMA (which I’ve just broken, of course). And was there a rule about collaborating? About working with friends, writing together? Laughter – of course there are DOGMA conferences, too, and DOGMA careers, or anti-careers. This is a war on tweed …

M. says philosophy is like an unrequited love affair. That’s what K. said, anyway. Unrequited – you get nothing back; there’s only longing, inadequacy, a life unfulfilled. Plans for the next academic year … No – I won’t tell you them! Philosophy frayed, philosophy compromised, interdisciplinarised out of existence! Laughter again: how else can it survive? we ask. And reply: there’s nothing of it left, and besides, who are we to represent philosophy? The usual conversation with W., ‘have you ever had a single idea?’ – ‘No’.

But then I came across the new book by X. in the library. Oh, it was terrible. I had to go and look at the Josipovici novels to recover, I felt weak and nauseous. Later, I looked at W.’s review again, with his dream of philosophy being reborn in Britain. Germany to France, and France to Britain. I laughed. I said to K., ‘I keep going only because X. is so bad. Can you believe his book, I mean, can you? ‘More laughter. ‘I’ve no ideas, nothing to say, and not in a good way – not like Beckett’.