Beyond Dogma, ultra-Dogma, we're agreed on that. Beyond Dogma – because even Dogma has its limit, just as God is not quite the Godhead – there is ultra-Dogma. I've touched it, W. says, he has to grant me that. It's something to do with my stupidity – the extent of my stupidity.
My apprenticeship in stupidity, W. says, was also an apprenticeship in Dogma, and even ultra-Dogma, he's quite sure of it. – 'You served your time'. I ran up against my limits, not once, but a thousand times. And I wore my limits away, as a river, over millennia, can wear away rock. – 'You made them irrelevant'.
In the end, they opened, they became a kind of landscape, a wide, flat plain over which there rolled great storms of idiocy. – 'They were fierce', says W., 'but you endured'. And then, when the storms had passed? A calm sky, a limpid sky, the stars flashing … I'd come to the highest, widest place. I'd been tested and survived. – 'Your stupidity was very pure'.
I drank a great deal. I was ill, perpetually ill. I lived in the ruins, in the squalor like a saint. – 'You were like Diogenes', says W., but without the drive to autarkeia and without any sense of askesis. Pure anaideia, that's what I achieved, says W. Pure shamelessness. But that's all that was required. Doesn't it hold him back, W., his sense of shame? I am far out ahead of him, W. says. My range is greater.
Ultra-Dogma … didn't I touch it once, that time in Freiburg? Didn't it brush by me in the contentlessness of my presentation. – 'You said nothing', says W., 'but with such vehemence'.
Vehemence: that's the word, says W. An absolute seriousness visited me. The audience were appalled. If they had rotten vegetables, they would have thrown them. If they weren't too polite to jeer, they would have jeered, and turned my table over.
'You should have been tarred and feathered', says W. 'You should have been sent out of town on a rail'. But I wasn't was I, though he saw some members of the audience flinch, W. says, which he's never seen before. It was their viscera, W. says. It was their insides.
Ultra-Dogma! Is it real? Is there such a thing? If I approached it, I barely knew it, W. says. Perhaps that's its condition: it can only come unrecognised. It can only come, like a thief into the heart of unknowing.
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