Our first summer as full timers. Our first summer when we were actually paid.
The campus, quiet in the summer. The campus, pace slowed down. The silence of the corridors. The peace in the corridors.
All the better to work. All the better for our unbroken labour.
Day after day, at our desks. In our offices. Day after day, with books open – real books, not PDFs, from the library. Day after day, at work at our desktops, with their vast monitors – twenty inches across. As big as the sky, practically. That actually worked. That weren’t continually crashing.
And a printer on our desk, on each of our desks! A laser-printer. With unlimited ink! Unlimited paper! So we could print out what we liked! Free of charge! To edit in pencil on the page!
And our cabinets – its drawers. One drawer for each essay we were working on. One drawer for each work in progress.
Working together, and apart in our separate offices. Hanging out at the end of the day, in righteous tiredness. Sundowners at the Free Trade. Going to catch a band at the Tyne.
Summer, opening. Summer, widening to admit us.
Like we were a secret of the summer. Like we could hide from the world in the summer.
The great resting of the uni, after the academic year. A great Calm that we belonged to. Because we were of the uni now. Because we had full time jobs. Because we were paid over the summer. Which meant that its rhythm was our rhythm. Its expiration, ours. Its outbreaths and inbreaths … Its uni yoga.
The great peace of the uni: that’s what we knew. The height of the sky – even the chem- trailed sky.
Freed into the summer. Flying up in our work into the summer sky. Like summer kites.
Like our work was part of the summer, of it. Summer on a page, on a screen.
Like we were Protected. Like we were God’s, and serving God. Like our work was part of God.
The paradise of work. Work’s happiness.
Good days – work filled days. Days gravid with work. Giving continuous birth to work. Finishing each day, knowing from where you’d proceed tomorrow. Knowing how you’d take it up again.
One day, giving unto another. Work, exploring itself, giving unto itself. Multiplying itself over the days. Carrying us with it, as if we were only a particle of our studies, bourne along by it.
Deadlines far off. Submissions months away. No urgency to publish, as there was before. No panic. Our hearts, not beating high. No stress nosebleeds. No contractions of the stomach.
Time! We had time!
Imagining what we might produce with years of summers like this. Eight hundred page masterworks, like those of Blumenberg or Moltmann. Significant works. That would carry out names forward.
We’d forgotten our stupidity for a while. We were allowed to forget it.
We lived in potentiality. Sunbathed in it. In what we might write. In what we might do.
Our first summer as full timers.
Bathing in potential. Illuminated by it. Singing with it.
Our second summer.
Ready to set to. Reading back over our previous summer’s work. Reading it. Looking back. All our drafts. All our work in progress.
Did we begin to doubt then? Had we already begun to doubt? Wonder about our abilities? Wonder about what we might really do, given time? Give peace? Given a full-time job?
The second summer. The summer of struggle. Struggling with ourselves! Struggling with our work!
Where the evenings weren’t quite so peaceful. When sundowners at the Free Trade didn’t feel quite so earned.
Was that when Cicero began inviting us over to her flat in the James Knott Memorial Building. When we first tasted her wine as we looked over the mouth of the Tyne?
Still, she held back from laughing at us. From open contempt for us.
Our third summer.
Summer of rain. Summer of disappointment. Summer of thwarted projects.
A summer that wasn’t a blank canvas anymore. A summer that wasn’t innocence. Wasn’t emptiness. A summer that didn’t just open and open and open. A summer that didn’t keep us like a secret.
The third summer, abandoning us to our nontalent. To our inability.
And Cicero was waiting. Cicero was gentle at first. She as patient – she’d waited a thousand days for this. Cicero, consoling us. But you could see the glee in her. She saw. She understood. We weren’t the summer’s anymore.
Now our Trillians nights began. Our drinking to oblivion nights, with Cicero in tow. Now Cicero revealed the truth of her stupidity-analysis. Showed her true inverted messianism. Now she told us what we’d been bought to Newcastle for.
And the fourth summer? That’s when we heard: we’d be oved to Organisational Management by Christmas.
Work in Progress 