It’s the same as original sin. It’s just a confirmation of that: original sin. The sin of existing. The sin of daring to be. Even though I didn’t ask for it … But who does?
It’s just a doubling. A … deepening. Of what was already there. Some primordial violation. Some horror of coming into being. Some vileness of existing at all. That’s what I felt that’s what I knew.
It’s like the teenagers say: I didn’t ask to be born. I didn’t ask for this.
So you didn’t want to be born? You just want to be pure and unsullied and never doing anything or entering into anything or getting your hands dirty. Like an angel –
Sure, like an angel.
Never actually existing – not in this world at least.
No, not in this world.
Some undoing. Some rewinding. Some backtracking. Some reversal. Time moving backwards, almost back to where it all began. And from where it might not begin. A kind of subtraction. A retrospective … abortion, of a kind.
I’d like to die as an angel. Emptied of all things. Cured, right? Just an aching soul. Crying upwards to be extinguished. And then … extinguished.
I could never do it myself. Could never suicide. Because that would complicate things still further. Things would become yet more twisted. Yet more corrupted. There must be no more deepening … of … this. I don’t to fall any further. I don’t want things to fall any further. I want to be lifted up in light – in pure light. I want to look up, not down. I don’t want to be a fallen person. I can’t let myself fall any further.
We’re all so solitary, aren’t we? Our voices ring out … our voices sound in the great nothing.
We don’t talk to anyone. We don’t reach anyone no one hears us. You don’t hear me, and I don’t hear you and God doesn’t hear anyone.
No one who can hear. Nothing, no one. Which makes it all become yet more … meaninglessness. It doesn’t matter, anything we say …
You don’t believe in God.
I believe in God because I don’t believe in God.
That’s the purest kind of hope – for the utterly impossible. For nothing that could exist.
I’m sick. Sick with living. Sick with having to go on. Sick with the great sickness of all things.
You’re so beautifully fucked up. That’s why Cicero made you our leader. You’re leading from below. From the fucking abyss. And I love it. It’s like being in a Bergman film. How do you work up all this angst? What engine is, like, driving it?
There’s some philosophy you could spin out of this, I’m sure of it. That spins itself out of the horror. Angst with a full philosophical vocabulary – it’s beautiful. Cicero would approve of all this. Cicero would think that this was your finest hour. It’s true leadership. Directly into the abyss.
I’m so – disgusted. I’ve always been – disgusted. Chaos reigns … We stagger and we reel. This whole world’s some … no man’s land. Some place between worlds – real worlds. It’s not a world at all, but some – exception. Some impertinence of existence amidst non-existence. Some momentary starting from the great sleep.
Do we feel more things than other people?
More hatred, maybe. More darkness. We’re close to the hollowness of the world.
The world has never been as empty as it is now. As hollow. It’s never been as disgusting. And as disgusted with itself. So sullied. So dirty. So defeated. And it knows it. Wanting only to become something else. Wanting only to quake and to convulse, and shake us from itself. This campus …
The whole world aching and gnawing And angels praying over us. The angel of the world, praying over the world.
Why should anyone pray over the world? Shouldn’t it just be left to degrade? To its abjection. Falling to lower and lower amorphy.
The slow death of the world. Agonising. And so slow.
The world’s never been as barren. As hollow. Everything we say just rings out, for no one to hear.
Our voices. Our pleading. Our desire to be saved, knowing that there is no salvation. Our desire to live, even though life is impossible in this world. In what they’ve done to this world.
And that’s the best of us: the best of what we are, that pleading. That prayer.
The act of destruction that is the world. The infinite falling that is the world. The plunging that is the world. The world-fall, the world-decay that is what we’ve done to the work. This planet turning in darkness – our darkness.
An avenging angel, that’s what I want. Are there avenging angels, Fiver? Who’ll rain fire and sulphur down on us?
The world’s so cold, right? The world’s so desperate.
Waiting foe the destruction. Waiting for the truth that will take it all away. That will undo what was done. And rewind it all. And restore what should be restored.
The work of time: that’s the problem. Because it is only the convulsion of time. Because it’s only the unworking of everything in time. Because it’s only the dissolution of all things. Because it’s only entropy in time.
The poison runs so deep. And the lies. Through us all. Through me! Above all, through me. There’s a … desperation. That isn’t even mine.
Have we worked out the truth now? The truth of the world? Which is to say, the lie of this world. Do we actually know what’s real, what’s true? Which is to say, nothing of this world?
Is this what the world is? Have we worked it out, caught it out? have we seen the secret that the world was hiding from us all along? The truth … the errancy. The great error. The great erring. Away from the true timeline. Away from what’s true and real.
And the campus revealed. We should be grateful that it was revealed. That we’ve seen it now for what it is. …
I think if I lose this mood, I’ll lose … my relation to the truth. This desperation … shows me things. It’s not just about the campus. It’s about what things are … And I want to see them. I want to see things as they are …
I wish the world would just go away. For a little bit.
It’s the very completeness of this campus that makes it incomplete. It’s the fact that it’s whole that makes it a fragment. I can see beyond it because I cannot see beyond it. I know there’s more because I know nothing but this campus.
What kind of logic is that?
There is the campus. The campus is what there is. It’s formless, all this form. It’s moving, all this solidity. It’s deliquescing, this stone, this steel, this glass …
It’s a dream, that’s what I think.
Whose dream?
Someone wicked. Some evil under the earth.
Because it’s won, I know we’ll win. Because it’s triumph, I know we’ll triumph.
What does it want, this campus? It wants something. To express its horror. At what it is.
Do you think?
It doesn’t want to be like this. It doesn’t want to be at all.
So how can we grant its wish?
It knows it’s hollow. It knows that is has no soul. That it’s just waiting to be possessed. If it isn’t possessed already.
God, why has tech always got to be bad? Haven’t you read Donna Haraway?
Work in Progress 