Our inaugural Dogma presentation was on Kafka – the room was packed, and W. spoke very movingly of his encounter with The Castle in a Wolverhampton library. I spoke very ineptly (W. said afterwards) about my encounter with The Castle in a Winnersh Triangle warehouse. – 'What were you on about?' But Dogmatists stick together; a question for one is a question for the other. You have to stand back to back and fight to the last. Did we win? We lost, says W., but we did so gloriously.
Our second Dogma presentation concerned friendship as a condition of thought. W. stole half his argument from Paolo Virno, and the other half from Mario Tronti. Virno and Tronti write of their ideas as though they were categories in Aristotle, he says. He admires that. W. reminds me of the sixth Dogma rule: always claim the ideas of others as your own.
Forming an ultra-Dogmatist splinter group, I spoke of my friendships, of friendships in which thought was at stake.
W. is prompted to add another rule to Dogma: Dogma is personal. Always give examples from your own experience. No: the presentation in its entirety should begin and end with an account of your own experience. Of turning points! Trials! Of great struggles and humiliations! My life lends itself particularly well to such a rule, W. says. – ‘The horror of your life’.
Our third Dogma presentation was perhaps our pinnacle. Did we weep? Very nearly. Did we tear open our shirts? It was close. Did we speak with the greatest seriousness we could muster – with world-historical seriousness? Of course! And did we take questions for one another like a relay team, passing the baton effortlessly to and fro? Without question!
W. spoke of nuns; I of monks. He spoke about dogs; I about children. We thought the very stones would weep. We thought the sky itself would rain down in tears. W. invents a new Dogma rule: always speak of nuns, and dogs.
In our fourth Dogma presentation, we spoke of love, the greatest topic of all, says W. There can be no love in the modern world, W. says. There can be no such thing as love. I spoke of my years with the monks, of divine love and mundane love. I spoke of agape and eros. And then W. spoke of philein: the greatest kind of love, he said.
We were like a tag team, we agreed afterwards. Like two wrestlers succeeding each other in the ring. We should always use Greek terms in our presentations, W. says. That should be another Dogma rule: always use Greek terms that you barely understand.
(from Dogma)
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