These aren’t just ruins. Something’s beginning here. Some strange new life.
I swear it’s becoming conscious. Like some counter-AI. Some sentience of general stupidity. Of wreckage. Of fuckedupness. Of study.
It’s like study’s coming to itself. Study’s waking up. Opening its eyes.
It’s like Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Some whole new process of creation. But this isn’t God’s creation, right?
The disgusting in bloom. Stupidity, coming to strange life.
Things that aren’t supposed to be.
An ontological rustzone. A place without use. A landscape. A wild zone. A terroir null.
A decay that’s also a creation. A rotting that’s also a making new. Senescence and youth. A coming to life of death. A dying that’s a living. How is that possible?
Some turn in evolution. Some swerve. Some sidestep. This isn’t supposed to happen.
And nothing to explain it. No plaques. No guided tours.
There’s some process at work. Like rust. Like decay. For which science has yet to find a name.
How long is it going to last? Is it part of time, normal time?
A counter-campus. An alter-university. That’s becoming – what?
The greater Idiocy – this is what it looks like. The vaster Uselessness.
The end that does not end. A locked groove.
Eternity in death, in dying. Dying that lasts forever, at least as long as life. A living death, right?
This is what study becomes, left to itself. It’s what stupidity becomes. It’s stupefaction as a place. It’s what students are, in some sense. It’s what we are.
I think it might be sentient. Try talking to it. Try asking it questions. How do we address it?
What do we call it?
Call it sir. Be respectful.
Or madam.
I’m not talking to some ruins.
Like a Chernobyl of the mind. Like it’s been irradiated, or something.
It might spontaneous generate some strange form of life. Like Swamp Thing. Ruins-Thing. Former-postgraduate-halls-Thing. Start stomping about.
We should set up home here. This is where we belong. It was made for us.
This is where we make sense, in our not making sense. This is where we might come alive, in our strange form of life.
It’s alive like we are. It’s dead like we are.
Work in Progress 