I always feel like I’ve got the bends, coming out after a day of study. Like I’ve got some kind of decompression sickness after ascending too quickly from the depths.
You reach depths?
The world doesn’t feel real. Not when it’s just been me and Susan Taubes all fucking day.
No one reads anymore but us – you do realise that, don’t you? No one reads books.
How’s it going, anyway? Are you making progress?
Don’t even ask me those kinds of questions. Fuck. I’m writing like never before, Celan once said to a friend. It was 1969, or something. A year or so before he killed himself. And he was writing like never before. Those late poems, so compacted. So dense and hermetic. After he died, they brought out five new collections of his poetry. 71, 72, 73 and so on. Anyway, I’m not writing like never before. It sucks.
Didn’t Cicero want to call you Susan Taubes?
God, I’d just love to be Susan Taubes.
Cicero knew you’ve love her.
I was stubborn. I wouldn’t actually read Susan Taubes until Cicero was sucked into some cosmic wormhole, or whatever.
I’ve got the Susan Taubes blues.
What are they like?
Did you ever hear that Jandek song, ‘Blues Turned Black’? Like that.
Are we meeting the others? Are the others going to be bearable? Drunk, they’re bad enough. But hungover …
Let’s go back to our comfort zone. Let’s talk about suicide. I never feel so alive as when I’m talking about suicide. So reassuring to feel that I have death at my fingertip. That I could just end it all at any time. Call time on the whole farce. Bring the blessed curtain down. Isn’t that a relief?
Who ever has these conversations but us? Who else talks like this? What’s wrong with us? Because something’s wrong.
Because everything’s wrong. Because existence is wrong. And we know it.
Is that why we’re Gnostics?
Neo-Gnostics.
I like being something.
We’re not nihilists, that’s the important thing.
Remind me why again?
Because we believe in the nothing of God.
Which makes us sound fucking cool.
You’re going to get a career. I have big hopes for you. You’re going to succeed. For all of us. One day we’ll all be waving our hankies goodbye as you sail off for better shores. Bye-bye, Kitten! Bye-bye!
Don’t take the piss.
You’ll sail the good ship Kitten right out of here. Leave us behind. There’ll be a plaque to you, one day. These will be known as your South Shields years.
Just fuck off.
You’ve got what it takes. The philosophical right stuff. You’ll leave us in the dust.
Double fuck off.
You’re the philosophical version of indie music. All twee and infantile and shambolic and non careerist and wilfully underachieving and despising ambition. All barely publishing. Or if you do, burying your work in obscure journals. You’re all about getting drunk instead. Or being hungover instead. Or sitting in the corner at conferences, scowling and hating everybody and imagining you know things, which you don’t.
True.
Just pulling each other own. Drugging each other through the mud and mire. Despising your audience. Starting stupid philosophical movements. Reading your papers to each at conferences, because no one else would come to your panels.
Being, like, total British society for European Philosophy sourpusses. Only speaking to your own kind. With your in-jokes and pisstaking and bad attitude. Cultivating the whole personal non grata thing. Competitions in in who can be the most doomy. The most, like, ostentatiously depressed.
You have us there.
And here you are with decent jobs at a decent uni. How do you square that circle?
At least you have a bit of life to you, before you fall into complete alcoholism. A bit of youthful charm.
And you?
Well, I’m no better. I’m actually worse, because I know all this.
We should found the Centre for Academic Nonachievement. For General Lay-about-ery – is that word? For Uncreative Destruction. For the Arts of Dossing. For Chronic Underachievement. For Halfarsery. For Contemplating our Mediocrity studies.
Damaged philosophy, that’s what we do. Self-sabotaging philosophy …
Not even philosophy, that’s what we do.
Is that where you don’t write anything and just criticize everyone who does?
You know us too well.
Work in Progress 