See, I’m becoming you. Your personality is bleeding into mine. We’re becoming indistinguishable. Is my personality bleeding into yours? You’ll deny it. Are you becoming more organised? More managerial?
Laughter. It’s like that film I saw once … that film on the coast, the Swedish coast. Persona. Very arthouse. The nurse becomes the actress and the actress becomes the nurse … or something.
We’re fading into the air. Fading into the afternoon. We’re disappearing. Do you feel we’re disappearing? I feel less real than I did. I feel … porous. I feel like a cloud. The afternoon is pouring through me. Do you feel real? Do you ever feel real, philosopher?
Why can’t we just have straight experience? Why can’t we just experience things are they are? Why are things always doubled up? Why do we always go meta?
There’s this surfeit of consciousness, which means we can catch Nature out. That we know Nature’s tricks. See – I’m being philosophical. That we’re not entirely swept away by love or infatuation or whatever this is. We’re not just lost to it.
Nature plays this trick on us, philosopher. Well, we can play a trick on it. We’re hacking Nature. We’re hacking love, right? We’re using it as a booster. We’re making it do our biding. We’re detourning love – that’s what it’s called, isn’t it: detourning? We’re doing what we want with it. Isn’t that a gas?
Isn’t that a very organisational management thing to do? How do you know it’s not Nature wanting you to play supposed tricks on her? That it’s not nature playing like a metatrick – the trick that makes us thinks we can play tricks? That makes us think we can hack nature?
And do you love him, your husband?
I don’t know. I think we’re bored of each other. Well, I’m bored of him. Fifteen years. It’s too long, right? Don’t you think we’d bore each other after fifteen years?
Not if you have children.
Maybe children would make you even more bored of each other. All that work.
But you wouldn’t be bored of them, maybe.
Maybe.
Would you like children? Or are you too busy with your magnum opus? I mean, would you actually take the time off work? Off writing? Off siting up here, looking up through the skylight?
If I met the right person.
The right person…. Who’d be the right person for you?: that’s the question … Who could pull you away from your work? Not me, anyway.
I’m convenient, aren’t I? I’m easy. I look after myself. You don’t have to woo me with flowers, although I do like the occasional email. No, this is ease itself for you, isn’t it? I come to you. I visit you in your room. I park my car and press the buzzer and you let me up.
It all comes to your door, doesn’t it? It comes on a plate. Here I am … Maybe I should withhold myself. Maybe I should be more mysterious. A bit of distance … that’s what you’d like, I’ll bet. A bit of mystery. I should be elusive.
But I have my needs too. I need my needs fulfilled too. I come here for a reason, you know. I have my agenda. I want things too.
I want … this. I want you. I like … becoming philosophical. Talking like this, which I can never do usually. Just saying these things. These big things. Just speaking into the afternoon. Seeing where words lead me. Where they lead us.
Maybe you’re used to this, philosopher. Maybe you think like this, talk like this. Well, not me. Not usually. Not even when my husband and I go on long car drives. When we drive down to the South to see our friends. Our relatives.
What do you talk about?
Our friends. Our relatives. Our plans. Work. People we know. All that kind of stuff. My dream business, that I want to set up one day. That’s what I should have done, instead of becoming an academic. That would have occupied me, like properly. And instead …
Anyway … I can’t speak like this, and I don’t. Here we are spinning talk out of nothing. Trying to say what? Trying to reach what? How lost we are? How lost all our words are? Everything we try to say?
I like myself when I’m with you. What you bring out of me. What all this brings out of me. I like what I’m becoming. What I’m reaching towards. Maybe I’m becoming spiritual. Would you mind that, philosopher? Or maybe I’m just becoming philosophical …
The soul of an organisational manager. The sentimental life of an organisational manager. The life and loves of an organisational manager. The afternoon tears of an organisational manager.
Work in Progress 