Postgraduates

Full of youthful zeal. The ardency of a fully operational postgraduate is a blinding thing. More powerful than any other force in the universe. They’re capable of anything …

You don’t understand the kind of people they are. So focused. So intense. They can beam laser beams from their eyes, pretty much. There’s nothing as powerful as postgraduate zeal, you know that.

 

Maybe the postgrad messiah will save us. Or does he just save postgrads? Will the postgrad messiah save us from Organisational Management?

 

The humanities postgrad messiah. That they’ve spent generations preparing for. Knowing that this would happen. The hour of the humanities greatest need?

 

The postgrad messiah is supposed to defeat the Bug.

Is the Bug the same as Organisational Management? Is the Bug behind Organisational Management, pulling its strings? Mysterious.

All I know is that the postgrad messiah is the anti-Bug.

 

We’re waiting for the postgraduate messiah.

In Newcastle?

It could be Newcastle. Somewhere in the UK provinces – that’s part of the lore.

Who made up all this?

It’s buried in the deep past. Which some postgraduates can see.

 

Like a Lawrence of Arabia of postgraduates. Who will lead them from captivity.

I hope we get to ride sandworms. Tell me there are sandworms.

 

Natural psychic abilities. All postgrads have them. They lose them when they graduate.

 

Postgrads go to live underground. In the Tunnels. In the hidden campus. Beneath this one.

What do they do down there?

Read. Prepare. Study. Gird themselves. For the Emergence.

And when does that happen?

That, I don’t know.

 

There’s this huge network of culverts beneath the campus. That’s where they live. There’s a whole postgrad civilization down there, supposedly. The campus below ground is greater than the campus above ground.

And what do they research?

Secret things. War against the Bug stuff. All this psychic stuff. They’re supposed to be able to levitate. They wander the ethereal plane. They do all this out of body projection.

 

The one who will lead us to paradise. That’s what they call him. And will save the university. And even the universe, we’re not sure. Sounds cool.

 

That’s why PhD students disappear on the brink of submission. They’ve passed through the Ceremony. They’re not the university’s now.

And then what?

They train other postgrads in the ceremony. And then go underground. The counter-campus. They live on weird mushrooms down there.

 

This isn’t just a party. It’s a ceremony. You’ll see deep postgrad rituals tonight.

 

It’s a Newcastle thing. Something to do with the closure of the old Philosophy department. A bunch of postgrads went underground and grew very strange.

 

I’ve managed to put it together. All the lore. Forty years ago, that’s when the department closed. It was very traumatic for everyone.

What happened to the lecturers?

Scattered. Some lost their sanity. Some died. Some retreated. We don’t know where they are now. Perhaps they’re underground, too.

And their postgraduates …

They wanted to preserve what they had there. To keep it going, somehow. And then did. In the secret campus.

 

The ritual of drinking the water of life. The hope is that they can recall everything their supervisors thought. And their supervisor’s supervisors.

 

It’s the postgrad faith that with the right link of supervisors and supervisees, they will produce the postgrad messiah.

And what will the postgrad messiah actually do?

Save European Philosophy. Let European Philosophy become something else in the Anglophone world. It won’t be about commentary – not just paraphrasing and introductory books. It’ll be it’s own thing. There’d be some … marriage of the European and the Anglophone. Of the two strands. Some great great European-style Anglophone philosophy.

Impossible.

That’s what the postgrads believe.

 

The great Darkening is coming. The postgrads know. When they close every European philosophy department in the country.

 

Postgrads are between worlds. Neither students, not really, nor staff.

 

Postgrads have nothing to lose. They are truth speakers. The most honest of all.

 

The postgrads are closer to things that we are. Purer.

 

Postgrads are the purest amongst us. They quiver with understanding. Tremble with it.

 

The postgrads are closer to the Truth than we are. It blows through them, the postgrads. Like wind through fields of wheat. Gently bowing their heads …

 

The postgrads: look at them, so cold, so pure … Shivering in truth. Frail, somewhat raw, but … strong, in a reedy kind of way.