Our lectures.
All our lives in what we said. Our misspent lives! Our derailed lives! Our displaced lives! Our humiliated lives! Our resentful lives! Our lives outside!
Our lectures.
Delivered from a life lived. Suffered. From hopelessness – long misery.
And from the joy of being allowed to speak. Unleashed. From the joy of being employed and away from the dreadful world out there!
What we’d waited to say. What we’d always wanted to say.
Our whole lives, offered up. Spoken.
Our lectures.
From a lectern – from on high? No! From the pit. From the pit of our lives. From our desperation. From our cast-off-ness. From our being outside. Words that could only be speaking by those who’d been Outside.
Our lectures.
Our suicidalism, carried over from our years of whoring. Barely concealing it.
Our lectures.
Proving to ourselves that we actually knew things. That we’d actually absorbed something. That we weren’t no marks. That we weren’t the idiots we’d been, pre-PhDs. That we’d picked up things along the way.
All those years of reading! All those evenings, all those weekends! All that reading on commutes!
Our lectures, proving that we knew stuff. That we weren’t idiots. That we knew more than they did, the students.
Now we could be wing-spreaders. Soarers. High altituders. Looking out over all. Seeing all. Surveying all.
We had the big picture. We knew the topography. The mountains. The valleys. The history of thought wasn’t unknown to us. It wasn’t actually terra incognita.
That the lectures were a seeking. All of them. It wasn’t about what we knew, what we’d found, but what we sought.
Our lectures were Desire, spoke Desire. Spoke yearning. Held themselves out into Yearning. Spread vast sails …
All we had to say – and more. Because the real lectures began after we’d said what we had to say. Only then … only after we’d said everything we thought we could, could we begin.
Work in Progress 