Our lectures.
We were raw. Sometimes, words strained. Sometimes, voices trembling. Sometimes, drops in volume. Whispers. The students had to lean in … Students were all but confidants. At other times, build. Break out. Crescendoes. Great peaks …
Were the students moved? Were the students stirred?
Our lectures.
Pure pathos. Half remembered quotations. Citations ‘from memory’. Sudden … accelerations. Decelerations. Hushed speech. Exhortations. Enconiums. Horatory stuff.
Our lectures.
Following our notes at first. Following our slides. And then? Putting aside our notes. Turning off our slides. Extemporising. Letting words come.
An opening out. A widening. Our words, reaching the Open. Our words, sun-touched. Sun-dazzled. Light breaking across them.
A shimmering across the surface of our words. Like light on water. A lambency. A coruscation. Light – brilliance. A sparking across.
We said the words and the light came. The light dazzled. The light sparkled.
The breath of God over the waters. And our words were the waters. Trembling under God. Our words, laid out. Quivering with light.
Our lectures.
A calmness. Of which we were incapable in any other sphere of life. Lapidary. Sentences, short, unfussy, simply following from one another. A logic that wasn’t even ours.
We spoke through the horror. Calmly. Quietly.
Our lectures.
Moments of calm in our teaching. Of stillness spreading around us. When we achieved a kind of simplicity. A limpidity. When we laid everything out, in a series of declarative sentences. Anaphorically. In a wisdom of despair – achieved despair.
That we’d reached an open grove of speech. That what we were saying was an opening. A widening. That we’d reached the sky. That we stood before the sky. A moment of grace … A reprieve in speech … That, for a time, the sentence was suspended.
That’s where our lecturing led. To … blessed moments. To happiness in speech To small utopias, where speech wandered into truth. Into illumination. Where we let speech receive light from above. From transcendence.
A kind of testimony. The way they were spoken. The way speech stood up. Stretched itself upwards. In its plainless. In spoken simplicity. Without technical terms. Without terms of the art. Without jargon.
Our lectures.
No, it wasn’t about our speech. It wasn’t what we said. It’s what spoke through us. What used us. What spoke by way of us. What was allowed to come to Earth. As though we were lightning rods. The light flashed down. A kind of … revelation. But of what? What was being shown?
Our lectures.
Did the students sense it? Did it Awaken them? Did they have a sense of light? Of a light from above? Did they have a sense of being led somewhere?
Our lectures.
And we had the common touch.
We didn’t close our eyes and pretend we were at Oxford. We didn’t speak to our students as though they were scholar-princes-and-princesses of yore.
We took questions. We listened. We read the room. Took the temperature – the spiritual temperature.
None of this was to be over their heads. None of this was to be as if to no one, to the open air, to ghosts of the academic past. We were addressing them and only them. They were the audience we wanted to reach.
Looking out at them. At their faces. Reading their eyes. Did they follow? Were they involved? Would they rather be somewhere else? Were they daydreaming? Woolgathering? Thinking about other things?
The effort to regain their attention. To say something shocking. Moving. Hilarious. Something – anything so as not to lose them. So as to deserve their focus.
Relating to them – them. Speaking to them. Making all of it real – about something real. Something vital. Something important. Making them feel it: the Seriousness. Of the topic. Of our discussion. Making them remember this lecture. This encounter. Now. Right here …
An urgency. A matter of life of death. Of utmost importance. That something would be missed if you hadn’t attended. If you haven’t been present here. Today …
To reach them. To think with them. Together. To draw them into thinking – your thinking, the class’s thinking. To think collectively. To think now, here …
Our lectures.
Our … intuitions. Flashes of insight. Sparks – of what? Mini-revelations. That we’d say without understanding what we said, like savants.
We’d reach a plane. A threshold. Just by talking. Just by talking into the air.
Our lectures.
How did we find our way to what we said? We didn’t know. Like we were undergoing hypnosis – or some counter-hypnosis. Like we were waking up – or falling asleep: which? Like we were lucid dreaming.
The truth of the world spoke through us. Echoed through us. Reverberated through our voices. Thickened them. Like some kind of Sprachgesang to invisible music.
We spoke … we said things … We were spoken. A kind of ventriloquy. A kind of thrown voice. But from where was the voice thrown? Philosophy itself? Philosophy – speaking through us?
Philosophy, innocent: speaking through us. Philosophy, amnesiac. Philosophy, stranded. Left behind.
Philosophy, marooned speaking through us. Wandering without itself, without its memories. And speaking through us.
Why did philosophy fall to us? Why were we the ones to receive it? Of all people? Because we were truly of our times. Because we were most truly of our times. Because we knew the world’s dereliction, and philosophy’s dereliction in the world.
Because we ourselves had been marooned. Deserted. Because we ourselves were lost in the world. In a perfect idiocy.
The truest word, which means the most abandoned word. The lost word, which is also the found word. The last testimony. The last message of philosophy. And so in its final hours, philosophy could say itself, speak itself, coincide with itself. Sum itself up. Through us. And before our students. With Cicero listening.
Wasn’t that what Cicero was waiting for? To receive a message from philosophy – a last message. To hear philosophy’s last words. It’s last will and testament. Before it just blinked out, in disgust. Before it disappeared into the world’s night.
Work in Progress 