This is the potion. This is magic. Drink this and …
And what? It tastes rank. Everything in my body cries, no!
Ignore your body.
It’s frothing. It’s, like, pouring over.
The ‘wine’. This inverted commas wine.
Maybe it was distilled in barrels with dead philosophers. With philosopher’s corpses. With the rotting bodies of great thinkers. With the corpses of Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and the others.
This wine tastes like oil. You could make a Molotov cocktail out of this wine. Throw it flaming at the enemy.
I just want it to be warm. God. This wine’s in league with the cold. It’s like Austrian ice-wine. It’s actually colder than the campus. Colder than the snow. Isn’t that cruel?
How come it’s still liquid?
Could it be false wine? Could, like, Organisational Management have taken over Cicero’s cellar. Substituted its wine for Cicero’s?
Too cunning.
The way Cicero stored her wine. Bottles on their sides. Resting their heads. As though asleep. She took more care of her bottles than she did of us.
She knew that. She said her wine should be roughed up. Introduced to the street. Which meant to us.
I always remember her wines being nice. Even lovely.
That was her superficial cellar. Her top cellar.
These wines were from the bottom cellar. The lower racks. The ones that we never managed to reach. That we never drank our way down to.
Maybe she was saving them. She knew they had some future purpose.
Maybe they were the ones she had no intention of drinking. That she’d bought on conference trips. On holidays in strange parts of the world. That were given to her by assorted lunatics. That strange importers had recommended to her.
Work in Progress 