Why did our laughter turn bad? Why is our laughter abyssal? We laugh at ourselves. At our imposture. At who we dared to present ourselves as being. As crappy monograph writers. As conference discussants. We laugh at all that …
We look at ourselves from the point of view of the void – that’s the thing. We see ourselves with the void’s eyes. As the void sees us. And that’s what laughs in us. At us. At everything.
It’s not that we see through it all. It’s that the void sees through it all. It sees in us, through us. It knows itself in us. That’s what Cicero saw.
The void at the heart of every institution. At the heart of the university. That stares out from every institution.
A kind of blindness. Black, blind depths that see. That see us. And through us. And beyond us, like an X-ray.
And that’s how we see ourselves, too. Through ourselves. Beyond ourselves. Because anything that isn’t the void is a lie. And a stupid lie. And a joke.
And that’s our lives: stupid lies. Jokes. Except for the void. Except for what sees through us and beyond us, blindly.
The void is potential. Or impotential. It’s the not yet and the not even. It’s what’s never begun. And cannot end. That just turns in itself. From nothingness to being and back again, endlessly.
The void, hovering between existence and non existence. Just rustling and rumbling and sometimes sending out flashes of lighting.
And we laugh because we know. We laugh at everything because we know what returns at the heart of it all. And in our own hearts.
And the void laughs in us. That’s what it becomes in us: laughter.
We never believed in it – what they pass off as reality. Consensual reality. What is it about us?
Immigrant parents. General working class-ness. Driss was a refugee, for fuck’s sake. That’ s what we have in common. What turns us from every certainty in the world. Ever investment in the world.
We need to discover the void – that’s why we drink. To remind ourselves of it. to bring it close.
Drink opens the void. if you drink enough. In the right way.
Drink is the means of access to the void. And the void itself.
We’re, like, drunken Buddhists. Drunken Zen Buddhists. Looking for Enlightenment. Wherever we can find it.
Cicero was a philosopher of the void, is that it? She wanted to prepare the way for the coming philosophers of the void. That was our business, or yours, Shiva.
She knew that that was the counter philosophy of the age. That that was what was needed.
Work in Progress 