We don’t want living philosophy. We don’t want living thought. We want to think as dead people. We want to think in death and of death and nothing other than death, and the error of death.
A perpetuity without beginning or end. That stays stagnant. Doesn’t produce, doesn’t destroy …
We can’t be anything. Only ever returning.
Beginning again, only to fail to begin. Ending once more, only to fail to end.
Belonging to a time – a non-time – before the beginning. Belonging to a time – a non-time – that comes after.
Start over – but don’t bother starting over. Give up – but don’t bother giving up. You can’t begin and you can’t finish.
A prolixity, an endlessness. Everything is futile, everything is sterile. Nothing advances. Nothing blossoms into a beginning. Nothing can lay down its head at the end.
No place to arrive, to rest. No home. No dwelling.
Only disturbance. Impersonal agitation. A trembling, a rumbling, a shaking of the earth that is the earth. The earth as earthquake.
The earth that will swallow everything – but indifferently. The earth doesn’t care what we’ve achieved or not achieved.
No work that is not unworked, no doing that simultaneously an undoing. No action that isn’t also inaction.
The stupidity of the earth. The stupidity of us who belong to the earth – who belong to it by belonging to nothing, to nowhere because that’s what the earth is: nothing and nowhere.
We’re stranded. Beached. Becalmed. We make no progress. We only revert – devolve. We don’t move forward. We don’t move at all.
Every gesture is sterile. Every beginning is fake. Every beginning collapses. Gives way. Falls into itself.
We will not succeed – we won’t even fail. A pathetic … falling short: is that it? Not failure, never quite failure, because the idea of failure still depends on success.
The ruin of all things. And there were only ever ruins. There was only ever unaccomplishment.
All our works were fruitless. Pathetic. Fruitless.
Unnoticed in their inachievement. Never magnificent in their failure. Never like the heroes of tragedy. Never beating their breasts in frustration.
Work in Progress 