Category: W.

Hindu pathos is very mysterious to the Jew, W. says. Why, for example did I send W. the creation hymn from the Vedas? Did I really think it worthy of our inspirational notebook?

There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose protection? Was there water, bottomlessly deep? Was there death or immortality? Was there a sign of night and day? Who really knows?

Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen? Perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not. Only the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows – or perhaps he does not know.

Where the Hindu finds pathos, W. says, the Jew only finds evasion and vagueness.

W. sends me a quotation of measureless profundity for me to keep with the others, he says.

Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time – is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.

It's from Cesare Pavese's diary, W. says. We ought to kneel before this page. Are you kneeling now?, he asks me on the phone. Go on, fat boy, kneel!

My troubles, W. says. I'd like to think I am a troubled man. My romantic troubles. My troubles at work. My life troubles. He's heard them all, W. says, and he's convinced by none of it.

They don't touch me, my so-called troubles. I like to moan and wail, W. says. In its way it's quite admirable, my moaning and wailing. The smallest thing will make me moan and wail. An imagined slight. A brusque email. A cloud on the horizon. 

Do I have a real sense of the apocalypse? Minor troubles – getting the one pound deposit back from my shopping trolley, or being able to say a single sentence without stuttering - certainly. But the apocalypse itself? I'm really only a meta-apocalypticist, W. says. I like the idea of the apocalypse. It gives me excuses, even a kind of leeway. But I have no real idea of what is to come.

That's what I always forget when I write about him, W. says. It's what's always left out: our joy. Were ever two people so joyous? Did laughter come so readily from any other pair of friends?

Laugh – that's what we do. We shake the air. We laugh until we cry, laugh until beer runs from our nostrils. We become giddy and light with laughter; we stagger like drunkards, and it's worse when we're drunk. Worse we attain that mystical plane of drunkenness, when Sal tells us she's sick of us and goes to bed.

'Stop fucking laughing, the pair of you', she says. But we're possessed. We're madmen who have set fire to all seriousness, and to the rubbish tip of their lives.

For our sixth Dogma presentation, W. writes two quotations on the blackboard, and we sit in silence. Man must be torn open again and again by the plowshare of suffering, he writes. Death is not overcome by not dying, but by our loving beyond death.

For our seventh, W. contents himself with a single quotation: the words Sorel was supposed to have said on his deathbed: We have destroyed the validity of all words. Nothing remains but violence. For the eighth, but a single word is necessary, projected onto the wall behind us: dereliction.

I send W. a quotation from my reading. I think joy is a lack of understanding of the situation in which we find ourselves. Who said that?, W. says. Tarkovsky, I tell him. Write it in your notebook!, says W. There are some quotations we need to keep before us.

I send W. another, again from Tarkovsky:

I can't stand mirth. Cheerful people seem guilty to me, because they can't comprehend the mournful value of existence. I accept happiness only in children and the elderly, with all others I am intolerant.

I never read philosophy, that's what Beckett said in an interview, W. says. I don’t understand it, he said. And when they asked him why he wrote his books, he said, I don’t know. I’m not an intellectual. I just feel things. I invented Molloy and the rest on the day I understood how stupid I’d been. I began then to write down the things I feel. 

How stupid must I have been to invent him, W.?, W. asks me. I might as well have invented him, he says, for all the resemblance the written W. bears to him. I made W. from my stupidity, says W. I folded him from it like a paper plane. Through a weird origami, I gave him life. And then I set him, like a paper tiger, against me.

Or was it the other round?, W. wonders. Did he make me from his stupidity? Did he invent me on the day he understood how stupid he was?

Before God, we are always in the wrong, W. announces. Before God, before the other human being made in the image of God. Am I in the wrong before W.? Undoubtedly. But is he in the wrong before me? W.'s responsible for me in some sense, he knows that. Terrible responsible. Sometimes, he thinks I am in some sense his own creation; I am the result of something that went wrong with him.

Adam, says the Talmud, was originally made a golem; only later did God give him human life. The latter is a power no human creator can imitate, says W., but the former – giving life to shapeless clay – lay in the power of the great Rabbis. Perhaps he conjured me up from a sense of his own failure, W. says. Perhaps I am only the way W., is in the wrong, its incessant embodiment.

Of course, friendship's never been enough by itself, for W. Or it only echoes in a direction it cannot reach. One day, there will be no friends, W. says, only comrades. He dreams of it: comrades, marching together, marching alongside one another, with no need for preliminaries.

What will they march upon? A new Winter Palace? A new Bastille? No, he only sees them marching, says W. They're not heading anywhere in particular.

Drink! says W. Drink! Really, there's nothing else for it. There's nothing better to do. The days are too long. This day, for example – what time is it? just after lunch. Just after lunch – it's unbearable! Only drinking can save us. We'll float drunkenly through the afternoon. We'll lie back and float, like idiots in a lido …

Of course, you can't be ambitious once you know you've failed, says W. And if there's one thing we know, it's that we've failed. W. realised long ago that he wasn't a genius, he says. – 'Do you think you're a genius?', W. asks me. And then, 'I think you still have nostalgia for the time when you thought you might be a genius'.

Most thought provoking is that we are still not thinking, I read out loud from my book. – 'Most thought provoking is that you think you're thinking', says W. 'Because you do, don't you?'

We are ferociously religious, says W., quoting Bataille. Are we? Oh yes, W. says, 'especially you. Especially you!' That's why he hangs out with me, W. says, he's sure of it: my immense religious instinct, of which I am unaware.

It's all to do with my intimate relationship with the everyday, W. says. It's to do with my years of unemployment and menial work, W. says.

When he thinks of religion, he immediately thinks of me working in my warehouse, he says. He immediately thinks of me, in the warehouse, with no hope in my life.

Only the hopeless can truly understand the everyday, W. says. Only they can approach the everyday at its level. And only those who can approach the everyday in such a way are really religious, W. says.

There's no point bringing any books in his man bag on one of our trips, W. says, because soon he'll be too drunk to read. And there's no point carrying his notebook either, because soon he'll be too drunk to think. Why does my presence make him drink so much?, W. asks. What is it about me? He wants only to drink until he passes out, W. says. He wants oblivion, he says, and this must have something to do with me.

W. admires loyalty wherever he finds it. Take the animal kingdom, for example. Swans!, says W. They mate for life! – 'You're the opposite of a swan', W. says. 'Friendship means nothing to you'. And then, 'You're always about to betray me', he says. 'You're thinking about it now, aren't you?' And then, 'You're a betrayer. You'd break the phalanx'. What phalanx? – 'The phalanx of our friendship!' 

W. remembers the worst, he says. He remembers the green dressing gown with its great holes. He remembers the stretches of white flesh which showed through those holes. – 'Your rolls of fat', says W.

It was like Noah over again, when Shem saw his father naked. He might as well have seen me naked, W. says, and shudders. Actually, that would have been better. But the green dressing gown, with its holes … It was the worst of sights, W. says. The very worst.

What is hell?, W. muses. It's when friend falls upon friend, he says. I would turn upon him, wouldn't I? I'm always about to. I'm already poised …

When friend turns upon friend, that will be the sign, says W. But then hasn't our friendship always involved a turning against him, W.? Hasn't it always meant the destruction of friendship? Yes, that's what W.'s concluded: it is nothing but the destruction of friendship in friendship and as friendship.

'What are you interested in?', W. asks me. 'What, really? Because it's not philosophy, is it? It's not thought'. No doubt I like reading about philosophy and reading about thought, that much is clear. It exercises some kind of fascination over me, W. says. There's something in me which responds. Something that is left of the good and the true, he says.

W. has grown increasingly convinced that intellectual conversation itself is an affectation. At first, he had supposed it was bad manners to talk of abstract things at dinner. When you eat, eat, that's what he had thought, and save the abstract matters for later.

But now? Intellectual conversation – so-called intellectual conversation – is itself a ruse, an excuse, he says. We have to plunge into concrete matters, W. says. Our conversation must be as concrete as our eating and drinking.

How much time do we have left? You can't tell, says W. The conditions for the disaster are here, they're omnipresent, but when will it actually come? He reads book after book on the oil crisis and the climate crisis. He reads about hedge funds and the futures market. The conditions for the end are here, but not the end itself, not yet.

Are we part of those conditions?, W. wonders. Are we part of the conditions of the collapse? He suspects so, he says. In some important way, it's all our fault. The mirror is broken, but what do the fragments reflect?, W. says, quoting some Bergman character. - 'You', W. says. 'Your stupidity. Your immense ugly face'.

We head out in search of the temporal layering of Newcastle. Temporal layering, W. says, is usually a hierarchical layering. Mumford said that. In the city, time becomes visible, Mumford says. Buildings, monument and public spaces, much more than the written record, leave an imprint of the minds of even the ignorant and indifferent. 'That's what you are, isn't it?', W. says. 'Ignorant and indifferent'.

For Mumford, W. says, the city sees time clashing with time, time challenging time. He looks through the different strata of time for liberatory temporal modalities. We're looking today. The traces of the medieval city are still there by the quayside. The last buildings to survive the great fire of 1854, started in a munitions dump in Gateshead, before exploding over the river to Newcastle.

A little further up, we explore a steep-sided valley where a river once ran. The Pandon Burn, W. says. It rose near my flat. In fact, it runs under my flat, in a culvert. It used to wind across Newcastle, past the hospital and through the university. Beer was brewed using Pandon Burn water. George Stephenson's house, long demolished, was built with a view of it. And what is now called Barras Bridge has, beneath the tarmac, an intact medieval bridge that stands above the culvert. A bridge over a sewer, since that's what they use the Pandon Burn for now, W. says: a sewer. Then it flowed east for a while before heading directly south, and carving out its valley.

No trace of it now, though, W. says, by the new apartment blocks and the new law courts. The burnside was supposed to be very beautiful. We head up from the quayside to inspect the Keelman's Hospital, W.'s favourite building in this part of town. The keelmen used to ferry coal up the river to waiting ships. When they were old and infirm – it was backbreaking work – they came here. Do we find any liberatory temporal modalities here? – 'How do you think you'd fare as a keelman?', W. asks me.

Of course, there's a serious limit to Mumford's analyses, W. says. Can it really be a matter of seeking older, supposedly more organic approaches to living in time? W. dislikes nostalgia, he says. He's more focused on the homogenisation of time, on the monopolisation of time that's occurred under capitalism.

Somehow, he thinks religion might be an answer. Didn't Bataille elect the obelisk commemorating Louis XVI as a sacred site? W.'s favourite pages of Bataille are about the sacrifice of the gibbon. He reads from his notebook.

Near a round pit, freshly dug in the midst of exuberant vegetation, a giant female gibbon struggles with three men, who tie her with long cords: her face is even more stupid than it is ignoble, and she lets out unbelievable screams of fear, screams answered by the various cries of small monkeys in the high branches.

We need a place in Newcastle where we might sacrifice a gibbon, W. says. And we need a gibbon.

Where are the people? Where are the people of Newcastle?, W.'s question, which he asked in despair by the new courts on the quayside, finds an answer. Wending down The Side from the station, there they come, boozy and colourful, full of noise and banter and exuberance. W. feels at home among the shirts and skirts, even as we push up towards town in the opposite direction.

Aren't these the descendants of the people banished to outlying estates? They're coming back to reclaim the quayside, W. says. To redeem the new ghettoes for the rich. It's theirs! The city is theirs!

The people of Newcastle! It's no surprise that Robinson, from Kieller's great films, found his utopia here. How have the people survived the technocrats? How the destruction of half the city in the name of traffic management?

Yet here they are, the descendants of the original workers, W. says, the anchorsmiths and salt-panners, the rope-makers and brewers whose faces were once covered with a film of coal-dust and smoke. They're the descendants of the keelmen who ferried coal down the river, of the glass-makers and waggon-drivers, and of the innumerable poor who lived among the wharfs and the warehouses, the taverns and coffee houses. Wasn't this always a city of workers?

A city of workers, and of those who thought they knew better than the workers what they really wanted. Of workers and those who feared workers, and even worse, the ragamuffins among the workers. Didn't they build the barracks, close to the city after the French revolution? Didn't they have the army marching in formation through the streets?

No revolution here. No revolt, and no monuments to the industrial past. The quayside redevelopment instead. The new art factory - not a gallery, but a factory – instead. Art in the international style, for the tourists. And the new music centre – at least they didn't call it a music factory!

And luxury apartments, apartments for investors. Apartments empty, awaiting tenants, awaiting the richest of tenants, who will never come, W. says. Because they were never going to come. Because all this, all this madness, is based on the fantasy of unlimited growth. Of the cycle of ever-expanding credit and debt.

No revolution here. No chance of revolution, as the bars fill and the clubs fill, and the streets resound with the click clack of stilettos. But it's enough that the people are here, W. says. Enough that the streets are filled and the streets owned even as the world turns towards destruction.

We wipe bap flour from our hands as we finish our pints. Later, as we walk up Grey Street, W. points out the building in which Eca de Queiroz, the famous Portuguese writer, used to work. How did he end up here in Newcastle?, we wonder. Was he happy here? Did he miss the cramped streets of Bairro Alto? Did his heart yearn for the fado of his homeland? We wonder what Bernardo Soares, Pessoa's famous creation, might have made of the city. W. has always seen something of Soares in me, he says. It's a great compliment.

Grainger's city centre has always impressed W. He chose his archiects locally. He used local materials. W. points out the fine ashlar facings of the terraced buildings. Grainger was a man of the enterpreneurial mid nineteenth century, after the Napoleonic wars, W. says. Didn't he demolish half the city, like T. Dan Smith? Undoubtedly, says W. But it was in the name of civic pride, W. says. It was in the name of utopia. Smith was a utopian too, of course. He, too, in his own way, was a man of civic pride. But he was a man of the car, above all. A man of the city motorway, which means the destruction of utopia.

Still, at least he wasn't a property developer, W. says. There's nothing worse! W. is unimpressed by the regeneration of the quayside, with its so-called public art. So-called public art is invariably a form of marketing for property development, he says. It's inevitably the forerunner of gentrification.

What is it in art that lends itself to such uses?, W. wonders. Has art – the whole history of art – come to an end, just as history is supposed to have done? Has it entirely lost its aura? But W. is suspicious of this view, just as he is suspicious of art. Perhaps it is only now, at the end of times, that art reveals itself for what it always was: shameless.

W. is an enemy of art. We ought to fine artists rather than subsidise them, he says. They ought to be subject to systematic purges. He has a special ire for the Baltic art museum, on the quayside, he says. What's it got to do with the city, with the people of the city? The working class should come and smash it all up, he says. But they moved them out west, didn't they? They moved the working class right out to the airport. Where are the public? W. says, looking round at the waterfront developments, at the new urban villages and cultural quarter. Where have they gone?

Was Pessoa a man of the public?, W. wonders. He thinks he might have been a monarchist and a reactionary, for all that he wrote in Lisbon cafes. I've been working on one of Pessoa's manuscripts as part of my studies of fate, W. knows that. The Education of a Stoic, which appealed to me because of its title, because of its resonances with the Stoic amor fati, the acceptance of destiny.

The Education of a Stoic: it's authored by one of Pessoa's most mysterious heteronyms, I tell W., Alvaro Coehlo de Athayde. He's said to be the 20th Baron of Tieve, and Pessoa has had him take his life, his book his last manuscript, having been supposedly left in a desk drawer.

The Education of a Stoic: W. doesn't know it, he says. Of course he has The Book of Disquiet close to him at all times. He can quote whole chunks of it from memory, he says. Well, he thinks he can. He probably gets it all wrong. The Baron killed himself, but Bernardo Soares did not, W. says.

He wonders whether writing and completing The Education of the Stoic was simply a way for Pessoa to short-circuit his ever-sprawling Book of Disquiet. Wasn't it a way to silence a voice in him which he also attributed to Bernardo Soares? W. wishes he could silence me, too. He wishes he could silence himself!

Amor fati: will we ever be capable of that? We're whiners, W. says. We're moaners, and it could never be otherwise. We live a posthumous life, that's what W.,'s always said. We live posthumously.

The sole literary connection of my flat lies in Whiteknights, across the allotments, W. says, a former mental hospital. Boswell's brother was there, he told me. Once, as Boswell was taking his leave, his brother asked, with tears in his eyes, to be taken with him. Boswell was indescribably moved, he recalls, but he knew his brother was being well looked after.

I take W. to see where the famous T. Dan Smith lived, who wanted to turn Newcastle into a Brazilia of the north. An unlikely ambition! But he persisted, driving a motorway through the centre of town. He wasn't a traffic Canute, Smith said in his autobiography. Large swathes of the city – including the whole of Jesmond – are accessible to the pedestrian only through a number of underroad pathways, which W. particularly dislikes. My part of town, and this is why W. likes it, has no such restrictions. He would undoubtedly be a traffic Canute as a town planner, W. says, turning back the tide of cars.

Last night, in his taxi from the station, W.'s driver told him how T. Dan Smith used to pick him up as a paperboy, driving up Richardson Road. He pointed out the front windows of the towerblock flat that became Smith's when he came out of prison. He must have lost the three-storeyed house that looked out over the Moor.

We follow the course of the motorway, along the edge of Exhibition Park and through to the apartment blocks of Brandling Park. Wittgenstein lived around here, when he worked as a hospital orderly, I tell W. You can see the blue plaque that marked his house from the bowling green in Brandling Park. W. has never cared much for Wittgenstein, he tells me. Though perhaps it is the cult of Wittgenstein he dislikes, he's not sure, W. says.

We look in vain for a plaque commemorating Zamyatin's time in Sanderson Road, Jesmond. Have I read We?, W. asks. Oh yes, I tell him. It reflects Zamyatin's Newcastle experience, W. says. And his Jesmond experience. W.'s convinced that the Russian's accounts of the rationalisation of labour reflect what he saw of work in the foundries and shipyards. And his accounts of regimented obedience are the mirror of what he observed of the rich Jesmonders among whom he lived, with their top hats and canes, the parish newspaper under their arms.

Later, W. directs us to the blue plaque commemorating Sid Chaplin, the miner turned writer who lived on Kimberley Gardens for many years. His widow invites us in for tea. We leave towards dinner time, heading down through the Vale towards Heaton, following the course of the culveted Ouseburn.

Crossing Warwick Street, W. insists we stop at a plaque detailing the construction of the culvert. Heaton once meant 'high-town', we discover, being separated from town by a steep valley. The valley was filled in to ease passage from the city, and the unimpressive city stadium was built on top.

I show W. where I'd been knocked to the ground by local youths. They kicked me in the head, I tell him. And I show him the route to the pubs in the Ouseburn Valley that I had travelled so many times in my lost weekend, as W. calls it.

I was out every night, W. remembers. I lived in pubs. Of course, I'd missed out on that in my own youth, W. says, that's how he accounts for it. I was in my room writing, wasn't I? I went into my room, and didn't come out for several years, that's what I told him. What was I doing in there? Writing!, W. knows that. I was writing away. But what was I writing? What did I, a dweller in rooms, have to write about? 

Still, I made up for them latter, my reclusive years, W. says. I came out of my room, ready for the pubs! I went straight from my room to the pubs, ready for them! He's forgotten my monk years, I point out. Ah yes, my monk years, W. says. He had forgotten them.

We find the spot where the Ouseburn re-emerges from the wooded cliff of the filled-in valley. How could have the river, a trickle in its wide channel, have formed such a valley? The Ouseburn was, of course, fundamental to the Industrial Revolution. Factory buildings – many of which are still standing – line the river as it opens into the Tyne. They used to make glass here, W. says, as we pass gaily-coloured boats marooned on mud banks. The Toon-tanic, W. reads on the side of one of the boats.

We stop for a pint at the Tyne, and for another in the garden of The Free Trade, looking up the river. I come here every day for a sundowner, he knows that, W. says. He approves. Sometimes you have to drink, he says. It has to become a kind of discipline. You need order!, says W. You need discipline!

W. admires the view. You can see the whole city from here, pretty much, he says. We look upriver to the Baltic and the Millennium Bridge. You need to leave your city periodically, W. says, if only to understand how much you are part of it. How much it is part of you!

Moving to Newcastle was my great opportunity, W. says. I felt my room, which is to say, the series of rooms in which I have lived and, over the years, barely left. I left my room, and came out to the pubs. I began to get some idea of the expansiveness of life, W. says. Of its possibilities.

Prior to Newcastle, in my Manchester years – my monk years – I was full only of a sense of life's impossibilities. That's what had drove me into the arms of the monks, W. says. His monk years were entirely different, W. says. He wasn't fleeing from the world, he says. He was looking for it.

Death, death, death: W. hears them tolling in the sky, the great bells. We're at the end, the very end! There can't be much more, can there? This is it, isn't it? The credits are rolling…. The game is up….

They're calling him home, W. says. He sees them as light-filled figures in light, the philosophers of the past, the other thinkers. Is that Kant? Is that Schleiermacher? Is that Maimon, made of light? He's falling upwards, W. says. Is this the Rapture?

And meanwhile, where am I falling? Down, only down, W. says. And who do I see? Is that Sabbatai Zevi, the apostate Messiah? Is that Alcibiades, the great betrayer? Is that the humanzee, bred in Soviet research labs?

It's the end, the very end. W. can hear voices. Go towards the light, that's what they're telling him. Meanwhile, he has the sensation of floating above his body. Has he died? Has the world ended? Is this the apocalypse, or not?

One day, not long from now, it'll just be me, him and a shopping trolley in the ash. One day, he and I, a shopping trolley and the road, the grey road under an ashen sky.

We felt things. Like great, dumb animals, we were only feeling. We thought like cattle lowing in the pasture. We thought like pigs snuffling in the dirt. What could we understand of what we were called to do?

But we were called, W.'s sure of that. We felt things. We felt the apocalypse approaching. We knew it, as animals know when an earthquake's coming. We sent up our howls into the night.

Don't you see?, we said to people. Don't you feel it?, we said, grabbing them by the lapels. We all but carried placards out into the street. The end is nigh: isn't that what wrote itself across every page of our papers? Repent: didn't that word repeat itself in everything we said?

We felt things. That was undeniable. We set out our coracles on great currents of feeling. We were felt, we were sure of that. Pathos opened its door to admit us. But did we think, too? Did thought take flight in us as feeling did? There are questions we can never answer, says W. It's for others to judge, he says.

What did they see as our eyes rolled upward? What, as we spoke in tongues and rolled on the floor? They must have thought we were on fire, though they couldn't see the flames, says W. That we were on fire from thought: did they think that? That thought itself set them aflame, like Olympic torches?

What impression did we leave, as we left the room? Was the light still dying in their eyes? Had they seen too much? Had they heard much too much? Did an angel with a fiery sword stand between us?

Why did it chose us, the greatest of idiots, Dogma?, says W. - 'Why did it choose you?' Why were we singled out? It must be like the balance of electrical charges that produce lightning in clouds. There must be the greatest possible difference between positive and negative ions. And thus, with Dogma, between the highest thought and the greatest idiocy. That's when lightning could strike.

But what did we think? What did thought set afire in us? We have no idea, no inkling. How could we have? Dogma was greater than us. Dogma was broader, more generous. Weren't we only swallows in the updraft? Weren't we leaves swept up in an autumn storm?

Perhaps we didn't think anything at all: how could we know? Perhaps we simply wandered out into the snow and got lost. Perhaps it was all a dream, all of this, the last hallucinations of men dying of frostbite.

Dogma, Dogma. What did it all mean? Should we even pronounce the word aloud? Perhaps it shouldn't be spoken of, like the name of God. Perhaps say it will only diminish its glory, and hearing it will only lessen its resonance. 

Wasn't it greater than us? Broader, as the great sky is broad? It was our measure. It was our ennoblement. When, otherwise, could we have been borne by thought, thought by it, rather than taking ourselves to have had thoughts of our own?

In truth, we've had no thoughts. We were ventriloquised; we spoke, but it wasn't us who spoke. We wept, but they weren't our tears. We felt things, great things, but in what sense were those feelings ours? Dogma touched us without noticing us. Dogma brushed us with its wings.

In the end, we should throw ourselves upon its shore, and ask for mercy. In the end, we should offer ourselves up in sacrifice, as offerings burning into the great mouth of the sky.

Doesn't Bruno S., who played Stroszek in Herzog's film, claim to transmit, rather than perform his songs? Bruno is a transmitter, he said. We're transmitters, W. says. We're lightning rods. A way for Dogma to return to itself. A way for thought to rest more deeply in thought.