Nimrod: Here in the depths, things become clearer. At the roots of the city. You can see things.
What do you see?
We were the original European department. Rivals to Warwick and Essex, back in the day. Before we were crushed. What matter?
And you are our successors.
And Cicero – we were intrigued by Cicero.
You knew her?
Oh, we met Cicero. I don’t think she knew who she was meeting. Tell me: why did she do it – refound philosophy? Reopen the department?
To save her own skin. Her department was closing. She didn’t want to retire quite yet. Not in her fifties.
That’s not the explanation.
We lost our souls in the’80s. With the reform of higher education. With marketisation. With managerialism. The university died. The sector died. Philosophy died, which meant the humanities died. Which meant the university died.
That’s a very lofty view of philosophy. And of the humanities.
Philosophy was the heart. The heart of it all.
What about the new campus? The O.M. campus?
Up there? That’s just a completion of what was there before. It’s more of the same. The enframing – that’s what Heidegger calls it, right? Gestell, which is untranslatable. It’s showing itself now – explicitly. It’s revealed. Without shadow. Without darkness.
That’s what we’re about down here: remembering the shadow and the darkness. Remembering what hides itself.
We work, it’s true, but we don’t really concentrate. We read, but we don’t focus. We sleep-read, really. We dream-read. If we take notes … they’re disconnected. None of us are sure what we add up to.
So you see, visitors, we’re no good for anything. We can’t organise a revolution. We can’t rise up. We can’t explode the towers.
Do you know someone who can?
What makes you ask that? Do you have friends in high places? Or low places. We heard you were building a golem. Or awakening it.
The golem …
What about the Bug?
The Bug … It’s true that some of the meditators around here have made contact … with other dimensions. But no one’s sure what the Bug can do. The Bug always seems so … irritable. I don’t think the Bug wants to help anyone. The Bug just wants to be left alone, I think.
But you – you could help us, Nimrod.
Fiver could help us. Come with us.
What’s Fiver’s role?
To remember everything.
Will that help?
I don’t know.
We don’t have souls. We don’t have souls anymore. They’ve deprived us of souls. I don’t even know what a soul is. Do you?
Where we had souls, there’s a gap. An ache. A Desire. Unless that is your soul – that longing for a soul. That yearning.
They made us hollow? They emptied us out? How did they do that? know only what we’re not. What we do not have.
We’re lost. We’re fallen. We have no soul.
Do you know what philosophy is: a way of talking about ghosts. And of talking about ourselves as ghosts.
It’s about our absence from ourselves. It’s about what we’re not, and cannot be. It’s about how we lost our souls.
We may be dead. But we’re not entirely numb. Rigor mortis hasn’t quite set in.
So we’ve devised a ceremony. We’ve synthesised a drug. To recover our memories. Our souls, maybe.
Work in Progress 