We’re important somehow. We’re indicative. We need to be studied, we studiers. We need to be thought about, we thinkers. We need to be examined, prodded. To work out what we’re about. We’re too good to go to waste.
Something about us. Something desperate. And wretched. But with a specific quality of desperateness. Of wretchedness. We’re damned in such an interesting way.
Degrading. Rotting, spiritually. Descending. Falling. The only movement of which we were capable.
Each of us, a war. Each, at war with ourselves! With philosophy! And in love with philosophy – all of philosophy – at the same time.
Kinds of cancer: that’s what we were. Each of us was a different cancer. Each of our personalities, a cancerous personality.
We were each a disease – a bright disease, a different disease, but a disease nonetheless. An aberration! A sport! Some mutation!
And wasn’t she a case, too, we asked Cicero?
Sure, she said. But it takes an interesting case to recognise an interesting case.
Wasn’t Cicero a case, and an exquisite case? Wasn’t she blooming, in her own way? Hadn’t she discovered her own peculiar madness?
Should we be watching her? Examining her? Prodding her? Taking down notes of her table talk? Her pub talk? Her bored-at-meetings talk?
Shouldn’t she be studied? Scrutinized? Pondered at length? Wasn’t there something indicative about her, too?
It’s Cicero and us together. The wasp and the orchid, right? A double becoming. Sending each other in interesting directions. Because it was her, because it was us …
Friendship! Is that what it was? Frenemy-ship!
Work in Progress 