More wine.
Disgusting, we agree. Still disgusting! If anything, more disgusting.
We’re supposed to be disgusted – that’s the point, we agree. Livia wanted our disgust. Disgust was to instruct us. It was to show us something. Make us taste something.
It makes me want to throw up.
But isn’t that the point? The wine makes want to vomit up everything. Everything we’ve learned. Everything we’ve known … All our philosophies … Which have never yet been philosophies of the disgusting. Which are not yet philosophies of the great poisoning.
And all the poison we’ve been made to take. All the evil stuff that we’ve swallowed down. All the noxious air that we’ve breathed. That’s made us what we are.
And we have to be disgusted with ourselves, too. We have to retch up ourselves. Expel ourselves. To be nothing other than this expulsion …
We must become an act of expulsion – nothing more. A casting out – of ourselves! Of everything we are! Everything we’ve been! What we’ve been made into!
What if Livia wanted us to keep it down? To … stomach it. To let it sink in. Pass through our digestive system. And to … convert it. That’s what Shiva did, right? That Halahala poison, or whatever.
All the destructive forces in the universe concentrated together. Shiva took it in. Drank it. He was going to sacrifice himself in order to save the universe. But then Sati gripped his neck to stop it reaching his stomach. So he held the poison in his neck …
Driss, bent over. Coughing out wine.
You failed the test, Driss!
It’s too late to hold our necks. The poison’s already reached our stomachs.
We’re metabolising it. The wine’s becoming part of us. Is that a good thing? A bad thing?
When the cry of our disgust reaches the ears of God … The cry of our … drunken disgustedness! Won’t that arouse God? Won’t it wake the angels? Won’t that be God’s cue to destroy the universe?
Livia never wanted it destroyed. Where the poison’s at its deepest, there, too is its saving power … Didn’t she used to repeat that? We haven’t fallen far enough, not yet – that’s the thing. There’s farther to go.
How can there be any farther to go?
Work in Progress 