Category: W.

Absurdly grateful – that's the phrase that sums it up, W. says. Take at my life, the misery of my life – take what little I've achieved, what little chance I had, and what little I've accomplished even despite that lack of opportunity – and still, I'm absurdly grateful.

I'm grateful for my flat, for the squalor in which I live. I'm grateful for the damp that streams down the walls and the rats that crawl over one another in my back yard. And with my solitude, my misery, the fact I speak to no one, the fact that no one speaks to me - it's exactly the same: I'm absurdly grateful.

'You're surprised even to have got this far', W. says, that's what horrifies him. This far – but how far have I got? If anything, I've gone backwards; I've ended up with less than I had before. I've subtracted something from the world. Haven't I taken from W.? Haven't I deprived him of some important part of his capability?

I'll thank them as they kick me in the teeth, W. says. But I'll thank them, too, when they kick W. in the teeth. A friend of mine deserves nothing else, that's how I think of it, isn't it? Down we fall, further and yet further. Down - another step, and down again – W. didn't know there were any more steps – and thanking them all the way …

Of course, you could never write anything down our humour. You could never give an examples. A single example could be fatal! You should portray it abstractly. As a kind of dance – a game. A beachball punted through the air. Punt and counterpunt. No witticisms, no bon mots, but rather a kind of lightening, a way in which the heaviest thoughts can be released into the air.

Nothing is safe – no idea. Or rather, nothing is dangerous, not really, in the eternity of our humour. Eternity – what a word! To think we have something to do with eternity! Our eternal chatter … our eternal puerility … Yes, it sounds good, it sounds grand, but the reality …! We should be ashamed. We should be downcast. Have we really got no further? Every day it's the same. Every day – the same! Laughter over beer. Joy in some beer garden, in some forgotten corner …

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.

Of course I couldn't write down what we say, says W. I shouldn't! Our obscenities. Our smut. How simple our sense of humour is! How base! And yet innocent, too – light. Wordplay, says W., it's all about that. Not wit – anything but that, although W. can be witty – but wordplay, innuendo.

It's a very British form of humour. It's where our Britishness redeems us, W. says. Didn't W. return from his year in France because he missed the humour? Hasn't it dragged him back from every adventure? He could have stayed abroad; could have wandered the great learning places of Europe, but did he? No. He came back. For a long time he kicked himself – why did he come back? Why did he return? But now he's embraced it; he understands what he is and of what he is a part.

Walser understands everything, W.'s often said. He's far out ahead of us – far ahead, like a scout. He's been to the end and come back, W. says. He knows what's out there, as we do not. We could learn everything we need to know from Walser's books, W. says, from a close study of Walser.

Lately, W.'s been returning to Walser, he says. He needed the kind of nourishment only Walser could give him. That's how he thinks of it – as nutritional. As the bite of an apple. As the first taste of Plymouth Gin, served over ice …

Walser! He always keeps a Walser in his man bag. That's what he says: a Walser, as if all his books were equivalent. As if it didn't matter so much what book of his one had, so long it was a Walser. A page of Walser can be enough, W. says. A paragraph – a line. He's inimitable.

It's time, W. says. No: it's after time. It's late. We're living on its lateness. We live a posthumous life.

Perhaps this is already hell, W. muses. Perhaps we already live in hell – is that it? They – the ones we once were – lived out their whole lives somewhere else, on earth – on the real earth. No doubt they committed terrible crimes. No doubt they were guilty of the worst, and we're what's left, serving out their sentence having forgotten everything … Hell, but perhaps it's heaven, for is life really so bad? Not now, not today, on this pleasant afternoon …

But perhaps, W. muses on another occasion, we're souls waiting to be reborn. Perhaps this is a great waiting room, this the time before a dentist's appointment, where nothing very important happens; you leaf through a magazine, you gaze out of the window …

But they've forgotten to call our names, haven't they? They've forgotten we are here, in the eternal waiting room. We've been left to ourselves, like abandoned children. And our seriousness is only a sham seriousness; our apocalypticism is only a kind of dressing up – and all our reading – the books of our philosophers – is only of the articles in some gossip magazine …

Death is striding towards us. Death is laughing in the morning air. It's so obvious, so clear. Why can't everyone see it: death, laughing, striding towards us?

Death is a strong-armed man. Death is a lumberjack, carrying a great axe. How healthy death is! How robust! But we are weaklings, saplings, too small for the axe. Our necks are too narrow.

No, we'll not feel it, the axe on our neck. Death will be busy with everyone but us.

Are we in love with the disaster? In some sense, we must be. It will give meaning to our lives, to the panic-flight of our lives. It will give meaning to our wailing, our dark prophecies and our dreadful underachievement. We want the disaster, we want nothing more …

The axe is falling. The axe is falling glittering from heaven. It's beautiful; it mesmerises, but still it is an axe; still it is fatal and its blow will destroy us all.

Let it fall on us first, we want to pray. Let us be first in line. But we, no doubt, will be among the last, and the last of the last. What would death want with us? Why would death want to sully its axe?

W. is tortured by the cries of the dead, of our ancestors, he says. We've betrayed them, he says. We've destroyed their memory. After the trust they placed in us – after the faith that generation, succeeding generation, would make good on the great task of human flourishing …

Every setback of the past – every cataclysm – should make us only more dutiful, more heedful of our task. Every horror – the whole slaughterbench of history – should only make us redouble our efforts. And the coming cataclysm? The cataclysm of cataclysms?

We've failed the dead, W. says. We've failed even the ones who failed. Even they're furious. Even they're crying out in the night, the ones who themselves could accomplish nothing.

How they're going to hate us, all of us, the future generations! W. can feel their hatred even now. They're not yet born, they've yet appeared on their scorched and burning earth, but they already hate us …

Some of them, of course, will never appear. It's the conditions of their birth that will have vanished. They're bodiless, soul-less, and above all, existence-less, since they'll never be born on earth.

And that's why their hatred is even greater than that of the ones who will be born. It's why they cry day and night from the heart of their non-existence: W. can hear them. It's his greatest torment.

Ignorance falling into ignorance. Ignorance redoubled, and lost in ignorance: that's what happens when we converse. Oh, how different it should have been!

W. has always been ready to imbibe wisdom – he's listened out; he's gone from thinker to thinker; he's read, of course – he's read whole libraries. And he's even ready to impart it – doesn't he associate more than usually with the young? – isn't he ready with explanation and encouragement?

Above all, however, he's dreamt of a conversation of peers, of a redoubled movement of imbibing and imparting. Hasn't he dreamt of a conversation which, passing from one to the other, would move thought forward?

We're hinderers of thought, W. says. We trip it up, humiliate it. There's thought, flat on the floor. There it is, drunk as we are drunk and throwing up over the side of the bridge …

It's not going well, is it?, says W. It's going badly, I agree. The stars are going out, or they should be … The disaster cannot come quickly for us. We're dependent upon it; we need it to come as a correlate of our sense of the disaster, which is overwhelming.

When we're brought to our knees by the real disaster, it will account for our being brought to our knees by our sense of the disaster. It will legitimate us; at last everyone will understand, although they'll be too busy with their own troubles to think to understand.

But we'll be content, won't we? At last our lives - the whole fiasco of our lives – will have made sense.

We are dead men, the walking dead. Oh God, the burden of disgust, of absolute disgust! We're disgusted with ourselves, we'll tell anyone who asks us. We've become terrible bores, speaking only of our disgust, and our self-disgust.

Exiled and wretched, Solomon Maimon – the ever-neglected Maimon – was said to give accounts of his disgrace for the price of a drink. And ours? Who will listen to the story of our disgrace? We have to buy them drinks, that's the terrible thing, W. says. We have to pay them to listen to us. Even our disgrace is uninteresting.

Is there any sight finer than this?, I say of the Tyne Bridge as it skims the roofs of the buildings in the gorge. You could touch its green underside from the highest of the roofgardens. The streetlamps, painted the same green, jut upwards from the bridge sides, one hundred and fifty feet in the air. And the great arch of the bridge rises a hundred feet higher … 

'You need a project', says W. 'You need something with which you can be occupied'. W. has his scholarly tasks, of course. He's even deigned to collaborate with me. But I've never taken it seriously, our collaboration, not really. I've never risen to the heights he envisaged for me.

Hadn't W. always wanted us to soar together in thought? Hadn't he pictured it in his minds as two larks looping and darting in flight – two larks, wings outstretched, whose flight was interlaced, interwoven, separate and apart; or as two never-resting swifts, following parallel channels in the air … We were never to rest. We'd live on the wing, one exploring this, one that, but always reuniting, always coming together in flight, in the onrush of flight, calling out to one another across the darkness …

To think like a javelin launched into space. To think like two javelins, launched in the same direction, arching through the air. To think as a body would fall – as two bodies fall, tumbling through space. Thinking be inevitable as falling under gravity. Thought would be our law, our fate … But we'd fall upwards into the sky … upwards into the heights of thought …

And instead? There is no flight; not mine, not W.'s. I am his cage, W. says. I am his aviary. What he could have been, if he left me behind! What skies he could have explored! But he knows that this, too, is an illusion; that my significance for him is as an excuse. He can blame me for everything. It's his fault, he can say, even as he knows nothing would have happened if he were free of me.

Take me to the sea!, W. cries every time he visits. W. has to see the sea! Our North Sea is very different to his Atlantic, he says. It even looks colder, he says, as it comes into view behind the Priory.

Sometimes we pay to enter the Priory, so W. can see the weathered gravestones whose names are no longer legible, and inspect what's left of the bunkers, which are a kind of cousin to those at Jennycliff, with empty sockets where there were once gun-placements. But today we're on a mission. W. has to get air into his lungs, he says. And he needs a drink!

We follow the road round to the Park Hotel, where we are served by an old waiter in a tuxedo. Chips and mayonnaise in the sun, watched by an old Bassett hound, head on paws. Two pints of beer arrive on a tray, the waiter with a white towel over his forearm. To the sea! cries W. as our glasses clink.

A trip of this kind should be part of the rhythm of my day, W. says. It should be a reward, a bonus. The sea, the sun – it's what should strength to gather in you again. To clear your head for work. For work! After such a day, W. says, he longs for nothing other than his study. It's time to read! He wants to draw the cawl of scholarship over his head …

But for me, who, as he knows, knows nothing of rhythm, nothing of steadiness, it's but part of the hubbub, meaningless just as everything that happens to me is meaningless. 'What can you make of all this?', W. says. 'The sea, the sunshine: what significance can it have for you?'

It must seem part of the pell-mell, he says. Part of the chaos I can barely hold back. In the end, I am a victim of events, rather than their master. Things happen to me; they happen again: what more sense can they have than that?

Brown light, brown beer … The Free Trade, above the quayside, and W. feels his life has peaked. Do I? Oh yes. There's nowhere finer. This is it, this is the moment …

We look out along the river to the town. Every evening I come here for a sundowner – isn't that what I told W.? Every evening! No wonder I write nothing anymore. No wonder I don't read. – 'How can you stand it? All that beer …' Every evening, I begin here with a pint or two and then head elsewhere for some more, I tell him. He shakes his head. It's madness!

But when I take him on the road that rises alongside the factories, and then down again, along the boats on the dried-up Ouseburn, he can see the charm. He could lose himself here, in the Ouseburn Valley, as I seem to have done, W. says. It would complete him, too; it would answer his needs. He'd never leave, he understands it all now.

Isn't that what I said I took from the Situationists?, W. says. The importance of eating well, of drinking only the finest beers, of wandering open-endedly through the city? He's horrified to see what psychogeography has become with me, W. says. Some spurious accounts of local history and a series of pub-crawls. What happened to politics? What happened to the desire to change the world?

It's left-wing melancholia – isn't that what I told W.? It's left-wing melancholia that leads us to drink? No more politics. There's nothing left. And so: the pub. And so: nights in the pub, nights looking for lock-ins so we can drink our way till dawn. Is this how it ends? The Ouseburn Valley is a trap, W. says. It's closed around me. I need to escape. To struggle against it. The very appeal of the Ouseburn Valley is a sign of its danger, W. says.

Pass me your notebook!, cries W. He's sure something important must be written there. He's sure that's where he'll find the key, the mystery of mysteries.

… And now it comes, the point of all points, which the Lord has truly revealed to me in my sleep: the point of all points for which there …

Those were Rosenzweig's last words, says W. That's what he indicated on his letter board despite his paralysis. He didn't finish, says W. He wasn't able to. What would he have said?

Kafka's last words were a different thing entirely, W. says. He wrote conversation slips, because he couldn't speak. A bird was in the room, he wrote that. Lemonade. Everything was so infinite. He wrote that, too. Whatever did he mean?

Brod saved Kafka's conversation slips, W. says, as perhaps he should save my notebook. 'Give me your notebook!', cries W. 'Give it to posterity'.

Beard of fat, W. reads from its pages. There's an illustration, too. - 'Did you draw this?' A picture of a belly, or a stomach and of some grey stuff hanging off the belly. Of course it was W. who told me about the beard of fat. Fat does not accumulate in the stomach so much as hang off the stomach like a beard, he told me. – 'That's what makes your belly round', he said.

In hell, there are no friends – W. recognises this quote. It's from Daniel Johnston, isn't it? I'd sent W. a Daniel Johnston print with the same title.

Bickering, W. reads out. – 'What's the significance of bickering for you?' He remembers how Sal and I bickered in America, and how it confused our hosts. It's the only way they can show affection, W. told them. 

Stretches of water, W. reads. There's a crude picture of a boat on the waves. – 'You must have been very bored', W. says. He knows I dream of stretches of water when I'm bored. Hadn't I demanded to be taken to the Mersey when we were in Liverpool? And to the lake at Titisee when we were in Freiburg?

W.'s found some of my poems, he says. I like to read them to him when I'm drunk.

The wrong venue/ the wrong city/ the wrong time/ the wrong conference/ We are the wrong people. We are wrong.

It has a marvellous simplicity, he says. And it's so true. Here's another:

Why do we fail at the level of the banal/ It's not about thought, or whether we can think/ but about not being able to have a shit/ or being locked out of our bedrooms.

That's more like an aphorism than a poem, W. says.

And then,

General incompetence is what will defeat capitalism/ that's why our general incompetence should make us laugh/ even though it makes us cry.

Very deep, W. says. There are several drawings too. – 'That was from your David Shrigley phase, wasn't it?'

And here's something W. himself wrote: YOUR SIN IS THE PUNISHMENT OF MY LIFE. When did he write that?, W. wonders. Sounds about right, though.

His own incapacity: it's with that that W. is always left. His incapacity: that's what remains to him after lights out. He lies in the dark with it, it dreams beside him: who is more intimate with his own incapacity than W.?

No one knows it better. And he will know nothing else; he will be pushed to think nothing else. The capacity to think only leads him to his incapacity; he begins only to end straightaway. Why do his powers desert him? Why do they seem always to have left him in advance?

W.'s dream: he's drowning, and he can't swim upwards into the light. His dream: drowning, and pulled ceaselessly down by an enormous weight. There's a block tied to one of his feet; he looks down, there it is – a block, a book. He makes out the letters: The Star of Redemption.

Another dream: a ceaseless ascent, a mountain climb into the freshest of air, his guide a few steps ahead of him. He feels lighter, happier; he wants to laugh; he asks, are we there? And the guide, turning, plunges a barbed spear into W.'s breast and draws him close. And across his forehead, glowing: The Star of Redemption.

I work on X., I work on Y., that's what every scholar likes to say, says W. I work on Rosenzweig. I work on Cohen. But this only means, in his case, that he is worked over by Rosenzweig, and worked over by Cohen. That their thought only strikes him down and ploughs him into the earth. It only strikes down above with the greatest indifference, with complete blindness, until he is ploughed utterly into the dirt of his ignorance.

He's pulverised by their thought, W. says. Broken by it. Rosenzweig sits closer to him than he himself. He looks up and there he is, Rosenzweig – not the real Rosenzweig, who was a saint, but the impossible one, the unreadable one, Rosenzweig insofar as W. will never understand him, Rosenzweig whose presence leaves nothing else for W. to do but to weep.

You will never understand me, says this fantasy Rosenzweig as he strokes W.'s hair. You haven't understood a line, he whispers, leaning over W.'s shoulder. And then he laughs and turns away; the book snaps shut; The Star of Redemption is closed to W.

If he had had the time, all the time in the world, what would he have written?, W. asks himself. What projects would he have taken on? He would have worked on Cohen, of course, and Rosenzweig as he does now. But he would have worked harder, and driven much deeper.

He would have plunged into their writings like a mole, following their interior corridors. He would have worked ceaselessly, ceaselessly until he could re-emerge, until the sunlight would have broken across his star-shaped snout.

What would he have become? A man of ideas, says W. A man of God and mathematics. A man at home in religion and philosophy. And a man who could at last turn, as Rosenzweig said he did, towards life.

Life!, cries W., That's all he wants. To live somehow. To begin to live. But it's not simple for him. It's not so for anyone. Life: what does that mean? Living: how to begin to do that? But in the meantime, working that out, scholarly articles would bump up like molehills. Articles, perhaps a monograph, exterior signs of vast underground processes, of unguessable paths, of unfathomable depths … But all on the way to Life.

What else would he have written? What else would he have done? To have too much time is a curse, W. says. To have too much time, too much opportunity: because it's only then that you would experience, really experience your own failure. We achieve little because we are worth little. We write rubbish because we are men of rubbish, and no amount of time is going to change that.

Life? We can barely sit at a table, W. says. What do we know about life?

Our eighth Dogma paper … what can we recall of that? What really happened? W.'s unsure; I'm unsure. Was there shouting? Was a paper ripped up? Were we forcibly ejected from the auditorium? Was there a diplomatic incident? Did I strip naked? Did W.? Did I strip him, W., naked? Something happened, we're sure of that, but we only have screen memories of the whole fiasco. We remember only owls, swooping through the night.

And the ninth? W. spke of my shortcomings, I of his. He cursed me and I cursed him.We came to blows. It was a performance piece, we agreed. It was a gestural form of Dogma.

The tenth, the notorious tenth was for our benefit only. We gave it in secret, under cover. No one must know! That's what we said to ourselves. Dogma has to undergo a profound occultation. We had to draw it back to the sources. To draw ourselves back! It was like a sweat lodge, we remember.

And the eleventh? It was in the great outdoors, we remember. On one of our walks over Jennycliff to Bovissands. I held forth for over an hour, W. remembers, visibly moved. The clouds parted. All of nature paused to listen. But I spoke only to myself, W. says. My talk was inaudible to him. – 'You muttered. You murmured'. I was like a druid, W. says. It was as though I commanded great forces, and was casting a spell.

His presentation was much more sober, he remembers. It had to be; I needed a counterbalance. He berated and harangued me. He listed my faults, and my betrayals of him. It took a long time; nearly all the way back. He was still speaking as we crossed the bay in the water taxi, and he only stopped when we'd reached Platters.

The twelth? We don't want to remember the twelth. It was a misstep, W. says. It was misconceived from the first. We're not dancers, and we should never try to be. Of course, we were trying to dance as non-dancers, but who would know that?

We skipped the thirteenth presentation altogether. I was always superstitious, W. says. The fourteenth … was going to be an action presentation. It was to be Dogma's first murder. But we got scared and backed out. It wasn't yet time for the Dogma Terror.

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.

What is Dogma?, we ask ourselves as dawn comes. What will it have been? We can have no idea, we know that, we agree. We came upon it by chance. It grazed our lives. It touched us, and who were we? Idiots, we agree. Dunces.

But perhaps that's what was required. Perhaps thought needed its buffoons. Perhaps thought could only begin with the exhaustion of thought, and who were we if not its exhausters? But what if it's all an illusion? What if there's nothing to it, and Dogma was just a mirage?

There's always a chance of that, we agree. There must be. Dogma has nothing to do with the order of proof. Faith – that's what belongs to Dogma. Messianism, we're sure of that.

But what is Dogma? What should we reply if we're asked. No one has asked us, it's true – but what if we were asked? It can't be explained, we've long since decided. It can only be felt. You can only lower yourself into it as into a warm bath.

Dogma is a condition, says W. It's an affair of the sinews, of the kidneys. It's an affair of the viscera. Dogma must be a blow to the head or not be at all, I say categorically. It's the blood in the chinks between the stones of the law, says W., very grandly.

Of course, there are Dogmatists everywhere – those who follow what we call Dogma without ever having formulated a rule, or put together a movement.

They are beacons to us, and whenever they speak, we sit at the very front, our notebooks on our knees. Did he really use the word enphoria? Is he really speaking of his time as a pastry chef? And the pathos! We feel drenched in pathos!

We're moved, terribly moved. Is he weeping? Are we? Our notebooks are full. We're close to the secret. What have we learned? We're on the brink of something terribly important, we know that. We're at the edge of something; it's very close.

What is Dogma?, we ponder. What has been vouchsafed to us – and why us, why we two, of all people? It must be our overwhelming sense of our stupidity. Our sense that we are at the end of things and that we are, in some sense, the end of things. And then, at the very end, when the sun is about to fall into the sea: what was shown, and to us?

That there is a secret order among thinkers, and among thoughts. That there's a secret kingdom of thinkers unknown even to those who belong to it. And who are we, amidst it all? The power behind the thrones? The jesters in their jangly caps? It's greater than us, we know that. We should give our lives over to it, serve.

What does it matter what we write or think in the first person? Thought must be collective, or not all. It must leap from thinker to think as lightning leaps down from a cloud. Every instinct in us was developed for this. Our lives will only make sense in respect of this.

Retrospective redemption: it will have made sense. From the perspective of Dogma, of the secret kingdom, won't it always have made sense?

Our fifth Dogma paper, our first overseas, we gave drunk, hopelessly drunk, and were almost completely incoherent. Only one person attended our sixth, so we went to the pub instead. For our seventh, we drank steadily through our paper, cracking open can after can …

The Dogmatist must always be drunk, that's the next rule, W. says. Drunk: yes, of course. We used to think drunkenness was what should follow thought, a successful performance of thought. But now we understand that it belongs to it. In the current madness, close to the end, who can bear the thoughts to be thought? Who can bear it – the coming end?

You have to drink, we agree. Drink to think and drink to present thought, the results of thought. It's a discipline, we decide. You have to start early and continue, steadily. We owe it to ourselves. No: we owe it to thought. And perhaps, for that reason, there will be no more papers. Perhaps, for the same reason, Dogma is always the end of Dogma, the sun crashing out of the sky.

Our inaugural Dogma paper was on Kafka – the room was packed, and W. spoke very movingly of his encounter with The Castle in a Wolverhampton library. I spoke rather ineptly 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 both. You must stand back to back and fight to the last. Did we win? We lost, says, W., but gloriously.

Our second Dogma paper was on friendship as a condition for thought. W. spoke on Virno, and the Italians. It was a rigorous talk in its way. He spoke of opportunism and cynicism as though they were categories in Aristotle.

Forming a one man 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: you must 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. Great struggles and obstacles. My life lends itself particularly well to such a rule, W. says. The horror of my life.

Our third Dogma paper 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 about monks. He spoke about dogs; I about children. We thought the very stones would weep. We thought the sky itself would fall. W. invents a new Dogma rule: you should always speak of nuns, and dogs.

In our fourth Dogma paper, 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 love 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 papers, W. says. That should be another Dogma rule: you must use Greek terms you barely understand.

We should start a philosophical movement, W. and I decide. What should we call it? Dogma, we say, remembering Lars Von Trier. And what are the rules? There should be many rules, W. says, and they should be constantly changing. And they should be secret, I say. No one should know them but us. And not even us!

The first rule, says W.: no publication. We're not to publish anything. Dogmas has to be live. And the second rule? No scholarship. No proper names. No footnotes. No quotations – not one. The third rule, he says, what should that be? Pathos – our papers should rely on emotion rather than argument. We should tear our shirts and pull out our hair. And we should weep -we should weep without end.

And what's the fourth rule to be? You speak with the greatest of seriousness, and only on topics about which you feel the greatest of seriousness. You should aim at maximum sincerity. Burning sincerity. Rending sincerity. You should be prepared to set yourself on fire before your audience, like those monks in Vietnam.

And the fifth rule? Dogma should always be collaborative. You must write with your friends. Your very friendship should depend upon what you write. It should mean nothing more!

W. remembers the collection, Radical Thought in Italy. It's always been a touchstone for him. It's pure Dogma, he says. They're all friends. No quotes, no references, they all have the same ideas and write about them as though they were world-historical. Oh yes, that's another rule – always write as though your ideas were world-historical. And always steal from your friends. Steal from everyone! In fact, that should be compulsory – you must always steal your ideas and claim them as your own.

We need a final rule, W. says. Tell no one about Dogma. No one! Unless they ask. And why should they?

Breakfast in Memphis. I demand coffee, good coffee. There's a Starbucks diagonally opposite the hotel, over the crossroads – that'll have to do. But how do we get there? We stand by the roadside, waiting. Cars pass in an endless stream. Cars, lorries, buses, without a break.

How are we going to get across? I'm desperate. We'll have to run, I tell W. We run, making the other side. But Sal's been left behind. What shall we do about Sal? There she is, waving to us. There's nothing we can do, W. says.

There's still one more road to cross. The same technique: a headlong rushing. We're madmen! Sal, meanwhile, has found a button you can push to get the traffic lights working. She crosses calmly. Why didn't we work that out? She crosses the second street. Here she is. You twats, she says, why did you leave me there?

We're heading to Graceland. Sal's going to buy some tat, she says. A load of tat. Her dad wants an Elvis tie. Sal will move heaven and earth to get her dad an Elvis tie, W. says. That's to be our focus: Sal's dad's Elvis tie.

As it happens, in the shop, there is no Elvis ties. Sal buys Elvis playing cards, Elvis keyrings, Elvis fridge magnets, Elvis dolls, Elvis snowglobes, toy pink cadillacs, a toy plane with Taking Care of Business on the tailfin, a book of Elvis-themed recipes, Elvis beermats, Elvis shot glasses, Elvis mugs, Elvis caps, an Elvis totebag and a deluxe Elvis-style adult jumpsuit. She spends $300. But there are no Elvis ties.

We go up and down Beale street looking for Elvis ties, but there are none there, either. We find an old shop that sells spells. They're piled haphazardly at the back in cardboard boxes with their names written on them. Warding Charm, says one. Love Spell, says another. What kind of spells would W. buy? The Fuck Off Lars spell, he says. No, not really.

By the Mississippi, Sal takes photos of us riding one another like horses. What are your thoughts about the Mississippi?, W. asks. We should ride down it like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Sal says our raft would sink. We'd drown straightaway, like kittens.

Memphis, unexpectedly, is cold. The tax driver in Memphis tells us the weather doesn't know what it's doing. We go to Gap to buy warm clothes. To Gap! Imagine it! The last place we wanted to go.

The changing rooms have buzzers in them to summon shop assistants. Gap's impossibly cheap. How can clothes be so cheap? In what mess of exploitation have we been caught? But we're cold, we'll have to compromise. I buy a hoodie, W. a cardigan. What do we look like? We look preppy, we decide, without knowing what this word means. We look like preppies.

It's still cold outside. What are we going to do? We rent a pool table. Preppies play pool, we decide. Meanwhile, we're being followed, W. observes, and it's true. The same rough-looking guys we saw earlier are slumped in leather chairs in the pool hall. They hate preppies and want to rid the world of us, W. says. Which is fine, because he thinks he hates preppies and would want to rid the world of them. They should beat us to death, he'd welcome it, W. says. But we outlast our would-be assailants, who tire of watching us play pool badly and laughing.

The word barbeque doesn't mean the same thing over here, says W. over dinner. Nor does the word ribs. He's right. What have we been served? Vast oval plates of red-cooked meat. Chips (they call them French fries) in enormous piles, greater than we've ever seen. It's frightening. I must be in heaven with my enormous greed, W. says. My life must have peaked at this point – has it? I've finally found a country where I won't feel perpetually starved to death.

We watch a band on Beale Street who are playing for tips. There are preppies everywhere, all round us. W. hates them. What are we doing here?, he says. The band've invented elaborate blues names for themselves. Doctor Bones. Medicine Hat Murphy. Between songs, they come round the crowd with a hat. People have to promote themselves in America, we've noticed that. They're not ashamed of it, as they would be back home. There's no welfare state, that's what does it, W. says. But playing for preppies! It's the ultimate indignity, W. says over beer.

Back to Nashville to Memphis by Greyhound. This time, we're prepared. We expect the worse. We should stock up on sandwiches! We need supplies! We head into the Peabody Hotel. There's a deli in there, that's where we'll get them, our supplies. We talk wine with the shop assistant. He wants to come to England for the wine, he says as he puts our sandwiches together.

There are long, snaking queues at the bus station, one after another. What's going on? Our bus is delayed. It's always late, says the woman standing in front of us. She's heading to a funeral, several states away. Won't make it now. And then she asks us why we're on the Greyhound. No one she knows would want to travel by Greyhound. It's for the poor, she says.

We're the only white people in the bus station. Why is that?, we wonder. Where are the students? Have they all got cars? Where are the white poor? A security guard watches on resignedly, a holstered gun pulled up round his shoulder.

On the big TV screen, there's a documentary on airplane crashes. There's footage of one crash after another. Screeching brakes. Metal crunching. Screams. And still no one tells us anything. There's no information.

Sal gets out a bag of Gummi bears, and offers them to people in the queue. She makes friends, as she always does. She goes out to smoke with them, and I sit down with W., who's becoming increasingly hysterical. Why is no one telling us anything?, he cries. Are we cattle?

It's time for Hindu stories, which always soothe W. Sometimes I sing to him when he gets hysterical. – 'Hey, little W. …' and he joins in, adding his voice to mine. But Hindu stories are another option, especially in a public space.

Tell me the one about the elephant god, W. says. What was his name? Ganesha, I tell him. And that guy who ended up with the head of a goat, who was he? Sati's father, I tell him.

By Greyhound to Memphis. An armed policeman behind the counter in the bus station watches us menacingly. What have we done? Something very wrong, we feel. There's something very wrong with us. – 'With you', W. says. 'Even he can sense it'.

On the bus, we head to the back seats, by the toilet. You get less carsick there, that's my reasoning. And you can watch everyone, you can see what's going on. W.'s happy to be led.

But something terrible must have happened in the toilet, we sense it as the bus fills up. There's a terrible smell. My God! What's wrong!

We set off. The bus is full, and we're trapped in the back seats by the door. The smell, the dreadful smell! Whose idea was it to sit on the back seat? Who demanded to sit there lest he get carsick? But W. blames himself. Why does he always follow me into the teeth of the catastrophe?

A passenger opens the door. – 'Don't do it', we told her. She gasps and crosses herself. - 'You're a brave woman'. Another approaches with an air freshener, holding it out before her as she opens the door and spraying it in the sign of the cross.

But it still smells. It smells terrible. We hold orange skins to our noses. We're suffocating. A third passenger comes to the door. She opens it, and goes in. We look at each other. She went in! Is she mad?

Minutes pass. We hear humming from inside. And then she emerges, smiling. No sound of a flush. She's cleaned the loo, says W. She cleaned it, for us. For everyone. We sit in awe. That's sainthood, says W.