Couldn’t they smell the desperation? The fact that we’d do anything – anything for a job. That we’d be fucked by anyone, would fuck anymore. Any humiliation. Any compromise. For a job.
Couldn’t they see that we’d been completely corrupted by our desperation? Completely abased by it.
Couldn’t they see that we were made what we were by our desperation? Which is to say: craven. Pathetic. Unadmirable.
People who’d just sell themselves out. Sell out their pride. Sell out their sense of who it is they were. Who’d travel anywhere for a job. Who’d put up with anything. Who would sign away their soul, more or less.
Pathetic. Abased. Compromised. Couldn’t they see that we’d say, Yes I will to any request. Volunteering for everything. Putting our hands straight up in the air. Available for it all. Simply waiting to be given an opportunity.
Craven. Ingratiating. That’s what we were. Suckers up and brown-nosers. People of no worth, no standards.
Talking to the great and the good at conferences. Vying to sit next to them at conference meals.
When we could barely afford the conferences! When we couldn’t feed ourselves at conferences! But we’d paid for a ticket to the conference meal just so we could place ourselves next to some influential person or another. Someone in charge of some Philosophy department or another. So that we’d be a face to them, at least. So they’d know our names at least.
All but putting ourselves out to be fucked. All but waring a sign around our necks saying, Will fuck for teaching hours. Free blow job for part time hours. For a few hours teaching here or there. A few hours teaching first year seminars, or whatever. Anything!
That’s the desperation we come from. And it’s still in us, not far from the surface. Only now it’s joined by resentment that we prostituted ourselves. With delayed anger that we humiliated ourselves. With the knowledge that we let ourselves become the lowest of the low. Pathetic sorts. Base sorts. Crawlers in the mud.
That’s who were, and now we’re angry.
Damned, more or less. Buried, more or less.
The bottomless swamp of our indignity. Sucking us in. Drawing us down.
We’ll never rise above what we were. What we had to be (or so we thought.)
It’s pathetic! Ludicrous! That we were so pathetic and ludicrous.
Is it any good feeling anger now? When it’s too late for out anger now? When the deed’s been done.
Not that Cicero required anything from us in exchange for our jobs. Not that Cicero ever took advantage. She was amused, we think, at our degradation. She saw what we ‘d become … I think.
Perhaps not. Perhaps she didn’t know how low things had suck.
Cicero liked our working classness. Out autodidacticism. The fact that we’d taught ourselves, basically. The whole of European philosophy. That we weren’t just fools. That our heads weren’t entirely empty.
We had some working class pathos about us. Even some mixed race pathos. Some council house pathos. An exoticism, perhaps. We were raw. We weren’t moderates. We were half drunk on what we read. On Hoelderlin!
That amused Cicero, the fact that we read Holderlin’s poetry. And so passionately! When who were to read Holderlin’s poetry? In facing translation. Which made us think that we could read Holderlin in German, which of course we couldn’t.
And Rene Char! We read Rene Char! In facing translation! What was wrong to us to think we could read Rene Char? That we deserved to read Rene Char? Laughable! Pathetic!
There are certain authors who should remain closed to us: that’s what we felt, which amused Cicero. Certain books. that should have been impossible for us to read. That should have been placed out of our reach. On the highest
What … creatures. What specimens. From the outer outer darkness. From outside the university. Wanting nothing other than to enter the university. Wanting only to find their way inside the university. Believing that they had no tolerable life outside the university. And perhaps we were right!
Overeducated. PhD’d. Seriously credentialled.
Half alcoholic. With shaking hands. Weak. Weak people. Compromised people. Humbled people. Ludicrous. Capering. Spineless. With nothing admirable about them. Nothing moral.
Spiritual hunchbacks – that’s what we’ve become. Scoliosis of the spiritual spine. We can’t stand upright anymore, And nor should we! Nor should we try! We’re too compromised for that. We’re too dead for that. Too reduced.
We don’t have full personalities. That’s what we should try to find now that we have jobs. We need to develop interests. Broaden our personalities. Which have been worn away to nothing. Which are all about work, and only work.
About getting published! About writing things too hard for us! Reading things that are just too difficult!
We need to discover the countryside, or something. Nature. We should go out and look at green open spaces. Revel in vistas. Climb hills. Learn to fish, or whatever. Learn to cook! Entertain, in the grand style! Host dinner parties!
And we’d learn the art of general conversation. Learn to talk on a wide variety of topics. Other than philosophy. Other than our studies.
As it is, when people turn to us, with polite interest and ask us about philosophy, we can’t think of anything to say, We stumble over our words. When they turn to us, out of friendly curiosity, and ask us about our own writing we can’t find the words. We just feel hopelessly lost. We can’t sum up what we’ve been doing, or what our interests are.
And when they ask how our work’s going, what we’ve been reading – showing interest in our lives, asking us about what is closest to us, we’re still unable to answer. We’re tongue-tied. Stumblers.
All those years of learning, and for what? All that expensive education, and what for? With what result? Esoterica. A few phrases that mean nothing to anyone. Some imitation thoughts. Some copyists’s thoughts. Some idiot’s thoughts. Some incoherences. Some stumbling. Some word salad.
Some published pages that simply betray our own confusion. The fact that we don’t have ideas of our owns. Discussing thoughts too deep for us. Working with ideas too complex for us. That we ould barely hold together in our heads.
We’re not even idiot savants. We’re not even holy foots. Show an interest in us and what do you get back? Ask us questions, and what can we say?
What have we been wasting our lives doing? Even we don’t know. Even we don’t have an answer.
Our whole lives, scratching our heads. And what for?
And we don’t know anything else. We can’t converse about anything else. We’re not practical people. We can’t catch our own food. We can’t mend cars, or whatever. We don’t even drive. We don’t know what to do with a car.
We can’t cross-country ski or whatever. We wouldn’t know how to survive out of doors for a night. We’re not outdoors types. We ‘d be lost, completely lost, up on a mountain. We can’t build erect stone walls. We’d die almost as soon as we were lost in the wilderness. We couldn’t grow things in pots in our yards. We don’t even grow things inside.
We can’t cook. We can’t mend things We can’t fix the plumbing. We can’t even drive a nail in the wall. We don’t own power tools. Drills. We don’t have a collection of screws. Or nails. Or a single hammer or a single chisel. Or any of those things. We don’t know how to fix a leak.
We’re clueless. We’re powerless. There are no strange pockets of knowledge that are ours. We’re not clever about anything. God help us when civilization fails.
Really, the end of civilization can’t come soon enough. At least our sort will just starve to death. At least there’d be some kind of natural selection.
Of course, what we really need is a Cultural Revolution. Where our kind is sent to the fields. That’s where we should be: in the fields! In the mud! Trying and failing to grow turnips, or whatever. Swedes. We should get allotments. Connect with the soil. Learn how to sow and harvest. Dig for victory.
We don’t really know how to make conversation. To show polite interest. To ask things of others. About their lives. Their lives are inconceivable to us. The lives of anyone not involved in the kinds of things we do. Who are not would-be thinkers and would-be writers. Who are not lost in books.
Sometimes, drunk, we can mange a few words. Sometimes, we can offer a drunken monologue. We can extemporise on hopelessness or failure or despair, but that’s about it. And we’re very pleased with ourselves when we do so. We’d actually said something! We’d actually uttered a few words!
That’s what happens when we drink: things seem to hold themselves together. Our intellectual lives. Our thoughts. Gain some kind of coherence. Seem to have led somewhere.
We feel all the pathos, when we drink. We discover grandiloquence! Loftiness!
But when we don’t? When we’re hungover, as we usually are? When we stagger about the day? When we teach?
Just crumbs. Fragments of sense.
It’s different when we drink. When we’ve had a pint or two at lunchtime. We can rise to a kind of lyricism, in the classroom. Words take flight, in the classroom.
We mark up the whiteboard. We extemporise wildly, in front of our Powerpoint slides. We’re possessed! Lifted! Elevated! For a few minutes. In front of some gullible undergraduates. Who have no interest whatsoever in what we’re saying. Who are busy, laptops open, doing their Xmas shopping, or whatever.
Work in Progress 