*The only thing we haven’t failed at: failure.
Bullshit. We’ve got jobs. We’ve got careers.
We failed at failure. We fucked up at fucking up. Real fuck ups would just be lost out there. Dead. Or drunk. Real failures would have blown their brains out.
Look at us: living on. Going on. Fucking surviving. How dare we! If we had any honour, any integrity, we’d have hung ourselves years ago. But we don’t, do we? We’re too mediocre to, like, grandly fail. To commit some auto-da-fe.
Instead … here we are, disappointing everyone, disappointing ourselves … God, if we really felt it. If failure actually reared up inside us. If we really knew it, our failure – how we’ve compromised ourselves. And compromised philosophy. And compromised humanity itself, probably.
I’d like to write a book called, Why I Write Such Bad Books. But even that’s a kind of grandstanding. A rubbing it in. A making-success of failure.
When the real horror that we didn’t fail, not completely. We’re survivors. We didn’t kill ourselves. We never actually had enough. We didn’t actually take our own lives. We didn’t just give into the current, let ourselves drown. We didn’t just disappear into the everyday, just, like, dissipate.
Our kind is ineliminable, somehow. Like we’re cockroaches, surviving against all the odds … But that’s too flattering. It’s not as if we have a strong survival instinct. It’s not as if we’ve struggled to live.
We did a bit. When we were looking for work.
Okay, it wasn’t easy to get jobs …
Anyway, we did make it. We did get jobs.
Only because Cicero picked us out from the scrum. Only because we tickled her fancy. It was chance, not anything else.
It was because we were failures – runts of the litter. Cicero could see it, and took pity on us.
*We made it … Because we couldn’t imagine ourselves doing anything else. Because we were too unresourceful … because we were too uncunning. We weren’t made for the world, right? We couldn’t stand the world. We just wanted a quite corner to, like die in.
But we didn’t die, right? We did it! We succeeded! Cicero let us through. The great gatekeeper. And it was wrong, because of all the others out there, cleverer than us, just scraping by. Better than us, living in their cars, or whatever.
And we were lucky.
Luck! It’s part of the whole thing. It’s like the system’s deliberately laughing itself by letting us through. It made an exception on purpose. Come on, do you really think its back was turned. That we’d been allowed to slip through? The system’s in auto destruct mode. The system’s allergic to itself. It’s got some auto-immune disease.
It was Cicero, bucking the system.
It was the system, choosing Cicero to choose us.
Humanities academia is a holding pen, that’s all. They’re a place to put us, our kind. To keep us gently defanged. To keep us out of trouble. To stop us becoming suicide bombers, or whatever. To protect us from the full force of nihilism, of world horror, that might turn us into proper radicals.
They’ve parked us here to keep us from doing any real damage. Just like they’ve parked the students, too. For their three year gap year. Their gap in the head year. And for our life long gap year. Our life long gap in the head year …
We have a mediocre kind of survival instinct. We didn’t actually go down. We’re not tragically flawed, or anything. We’re not Jude the Obscures. We slopped through. We flopped through. We threw ourselves onto the beach.
And now here we are, with our offices, with our views. With printers on our desks.
The whole process of job-getting was mediocre, like ourselves. Look, the systems’ moved elsewhere. Its frontier isn’t here. None of this is important. We haven’t breached the system. We haven’t found our way in.
We want to think that we’re grand failures. We want to find grandeur in our fuck up. But the fact is, we haven’t fucked up. We’ve got along. We’ve survived. We’ve found ourselves into a Russell Group university. We’ve lucked out. We rolled the dice, and here we are.
There’s no meaning to this. Can you bear that? It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t not mean, either. It’s not meaningless, not entirely contingent.
Here we are. No one cares. There’s a great shrugging of shoulders. A great meh. Here we are, writing out bad books and it doesn’t matter, one way or the other.
Work in Progress 