Summer

We grow old during the academic year. We grow ancient. And then we need to become young again, at the end of the academic year. We need to find it again, our innocence. Our youth. The youth that you incarnate, postgraduates.


Summer is a dreaming, postgraduates. A recovery. Summer is contemplation.


We all need to lie fallow, postgraduates. We all need Time. We need to go larval. We need slow incubation.

Eternal summer! Weeks and weeks, held into the eternal. Turning there, kept

by the eternal. Weeks, lying back beneath summer skies. Watching summer pass over us.


With no one knocking on our office doors. No one phoning us on our office telephones. With but a few postgraduate meetings every now and then.


Summers becalmed, postgraduates. Summers with no breeze, nothing taking us forward. Summers without wind to fill our sails.

And weren’t we glad of it, postgraduates: to be blown like dandelion seeds through the corridors of summer? To hatch into summer, like summer midges?


Weeks and weeks in the eternal, postgraduates. Weeks settled in the eternal. Turning there. Kept by the eternal. Held by the eternal.


Trust in summer, postgraduates. That summer is eternal. That the weeks will turn in eternity. How many weeks before the start of the term? Before the start of the new academic year? Infinite weeks. Endless weeks.


Summer, working through you. Summer, thinking through you. Summer, reading through you.


And time – the gift of time, postgraduates. Time’s timing. Time’s whiling. The turning of time in summer.


Possibility: that was to be your element, postgraduates. Potentiality – when you were brought back to ourselves. Given to yourselves – all over again.


The summer inside you, postgraduates. The outside within. Our summer. The perfect coincidence of yourselves and the Origin. And the Beginning. And the Inexhaustible.


Stunned summer, like a blow to the head. Summer stunned, reeling, staggering all around you. And you were staggering, too.

Summer stupor. The summer when idiocy could breathe out. Be what it was. When you no longer tried to escape our stupidity. When you accepted it. Merged with it. Became one with it.

Your stupidity, joining the great stupidity. Your idiocy, joining the cosmic idiocy. The idiotic Creation. (And wasn’t God an idiot, too, in the high summer? Hadn’t God always been the perfect idiot, above the high summer sun?)

You wore your summer haloes, you philosophers of summer. You burned with summer Genius, which was indistinguishable from summer idiocy.

You worked, yes, but it was souffle-light, your working. You worked, but your work had air inside it, like kneaded bread. Summer air! Summer lightness!

If you fell asleep in the sun, what then, postgraduates? If you closed our eyes, of what would we dream? Dream those dreams now, in the cold of the Organisational Management campus. Remember them – your dreams. The summer’s dream, when stupidity holds hands with brilliance.