Didn’t Cicero hint sometimes about her Tractatus? It was in numbered points, very precise, she said sometimes. It’s written in the form of a poem, a bit like Lucretius, she said at other times. It’s written by a whole universe of heteronyms, in many volumes: didn’t she say that, too?
She considered it a very Jewish work, her magnum opus – that’s what she said. It was a product of her secret Judaism, which none of us could understand.
It was a passengenwerk, she said. A collection of fragments. Which she’d selected itself!
But when she disappeared, the work must have gone with her.
Her magnum opus was her life: I heard her say that. Her magnum opus was us – that’s what I heard her say. Was our department. And she left when it was essentially complete.
We were her work. This department.
Cicero’s life was her magnum opus. The philosophy embodied in her life. The philosophy that was her life, understood in the right way. And even in her disappearance, interpreted in the right way.
And in her wine, interpreted in the right way – that’s what I think.
The Ciceronian life. The dimensions of that life. The perversions of that life. The magnificence of that life. The foolishness of that life. There should be biographies of Cicero – plural! Rival biographies. At odds biographies.
Chapter twenty-six: tight perms. Chapter twenty-seven: whippets.
Cicero philosophised in life, rather than treatises. She philosophised in gestures. Like the Organisational Management move itself. Like her disappearance.
Yes, that was her philosophy. Everything was there for those who could understand it.
You were her magnum opus, Shiva. Don’t you see that?
And now her wine is all we have left of her. Drink this in memory of her, and so on.
Work in Progress 