Vanished Earth

Realisation: we don’t want to complete our mission. We don’t want to the remnant of the old department or whatever.

We couldn’t bear to find it! Even the thought of it! It’d be too much – what it was; what it could be; what was possible, back then.

The used-to-be academia. The once-was academia. It has nothing to do with us. It has nothing to do with this. We these ruins …

We could bear to meet what has disappeared only in its disappearance. The concealed only in its concealment. We could bear to experience the impossibility of what was once so eminently possible in its impossibility. In the enormity of the tension between present and past.

The vanished world! The forgotten world! That we want in its vanishedness, in its having-been-forgotten. That we can know only as we can never know it, as it lies beyond us.

We want its dying without end, old academia. We want the disappeared Eurydice. The forgotten Eurydice. The Eurydice forever dead, and who can’t be saved, who can’t be brought back to life. We want the buried as the buried. The forgotten as the forgotten. We want the dark as the dark. The hidden as the hidden.

Which is to say, we want the earth, this earth, in which everything has always and already disappeared.  We want this flood of earth. This compost of all dead things. This counter-terroir, from which nothing can grow, and into which everything disappears.

We want it as it escapes us, and as this escape. We want it as what is lost, and what can never be found. We want it as it is inconceivable, impossible. As what the university once was and cannot be again. As our impossible desire that it return.

We want to touch the old department in its shadowy absence. In its veiled presence. As Eurydice, in other words. We want its dying without end, old academia. The ordeal of its absence.