Cold! It’s so cold!
We’re thinking only of mulled wine at the Organisational Management party – will they serve mulled wine?
But isn’t alcohol is banned on campus now?
Mince pies, then! Will the mince pies be warm at the Organisational Management party?
Can you imagine how bad university catering mince pies will be?
At least Organisational Management towers will be heated. At least there will be the warmth of other bodies …
Sheltering from the wind.
Our PhD students are turning blue.
Passing them X’s hipflask. Giving them a nip. That’ll warm them up.
A pep talk: You’re representing us at the Organisational Management Christmas party, postgraduates, don’t forget that! There’s to be no Organisational Management merriment. You’re to regard the enemy with suspicion! Dislike! Just because we’re fraternising with the enemy doesn’t mean we can let down our guard.
The Organisational Managers probably bought their postgraduates from a plan. They probably built their postgraduates. But you are human all too human. Human 1.0. You’re delicate. Brilliant! Brilliant in your delicacy! In your half-derangement. My God! We’ve brought you this far – we don’t want to lose you now.
Don’t weep, postgraduates! We’re defeated, postgraduates! Cosmically! Actually! But you … you still have hope. You have to have hope. Just as we have hope, but not for us. But for you, postgraduates! For your nobility! Your incorruptibility!
No, we mustn’t let you freeze to death. The most painful thing in the world: having your PhD student die before you. No PhD supervisor deserves that.
You’re our future, postgraduates. They’re supposed to outlive us, live beyond us. Reach farther. Achieve what we’ve never been able to achieve.
We’re your Doktorvaters and Doktormutters, as they say in Germany, postgraduates. You’re our Doktorkinderen. You’ll carry forward our work. You’ll quote us. Remember us. So that it will not have been in vain. So that we will not have been in vain. Our academic careers will have meant something. Because it led to you, postgraduates. It bloomed in you. It reached full flower in you.
You’re spears flung through the philosophical night, postgraduates. You’re soaring! At the height of your flight! You’re like we were, ten years ago – our younger selves. You’re younger versions of who we are. Not yet compromised. Not yet all loss-of-innocence. Not yet fully disappointed. Not yet crashed up against the reality-principle. Against the so-called real world.
And you’re not suited to social chit chat, postgraduates. To an Organisational Management party. Neither are we, for God’s sake! Look at us! We’re not small talkers! We’re burners-down. We’re destroyers. We’re apocalypticists. We’re end-of-the-world-ists.
Only an auto-da-fe of the Organisational Management campus will do. A destruction of the entire Organisational Management world. Some magnificent potlatch. A destruction as great as the campus. The unmanageable – as explosion.
These paving stones, swelling upwards. Breaking apart. And the Earth, revealing itself. There it will be: an open wound: the earth.
Rending – just that. Tearing. The revenge of the Earth, welling up beneath the campus. All the buildings, heaving up. All the glass and steel. The Earth, rising up to meet the sky. And that will be the most beautiful day of all.
Work in Progress 