Author: Lars Iyer

We’re ready to die. We have no attachment to life. We’re tired of life. We’re ready to say, Let it be your will.

If we felt, really feel, our mediocrity, what then? Might something really happen then? If we experienced, really experienced our despair at our idiocy, might we not be idiots anymore?

 

Is our idiocy a wanting to change? Is our despair a prayer? Do we merely wallow in our stupidity, dwell in it, rather than actually want to be transformed?

 

To experience our stupidity genuinely, sincerely. To actually want to be transformed.

To have a thought, a single thought. The simplest thought. Even if it’s only the purest thought of our stupidity.

 

A prayer to be what we are not.

 

This is our chance, away from Cicero. Now that Cicero’s gone.

Our chance for what?

To find out who we are. To find out what we can do. To find out what we want.

We’re Cicero’s people. Cicero has faith in us, even if no one else does. Cicero will lead us out of our maze: that’s what we thought. Cicero will lead us from ourselves, from the trial of our mediocrity. From the passion of our idiocy.

 

Cicero, who always knew our idiocy as awareness, as desire. Who knew our mediocrity as a yearning to be what we are not.

The world’s just some … monstrosity.

But we’re monstrous, too. That’s the thing. There’s something wrong with us, just as there’s something wrong with the world. We’re warped as the world’s warped. We’re twisted as the world’s twisted.

 

Are we God’s idiots? The devil’s?

 

Another night. At the pub again.

Must we ratchet it up again? The whole dog and pony act?

No, this isn’t good for us. It isn’t good for the universe.

 

We see everything apocalyptically. We have an apocalyptic bias. An eschatological bias. A Gnostic bias, probably.

 

The air hates being the air. The air’s just wandering lost in air. The air, dazed in air. Just like water’s flowing lost in water. Just like the Earth just plunges into Earth.

They’re all waiting for redemption. They’re waiting for their proper names.

 

The aching of all things in their self-hatred. In their loathing for themselves. In their atheism.

The atheism of air, of water, of the earth. Our own atheism, which is the heart of our self-hatred.

 

We hate our own nihilism, as the universe hates its own nihilism.

 

Lost in the coils of our evil. Lost in the coiling, the writhing. Lost in the agitation of our sin. Lost in the deepening of the Fall.

 

How deep does the boredom go? How deep does it run? The world-disgust? The world-horror?

Deeper than us. It’s the disgust of this world for itself. It’s the horror of the world for what it is. It’s like auto-immunity disease. It’s auto-horror. Self-rejection.

Too much consciousness. Too much awareness. Too much time to think – is that it? Too much life. We’re too awake.

We’re alert, but what for? We’re open-eyed, but what for? What is it that requires our vigilance?

 

We’re alive, but why? For what purpose? How do we use life? What do we do with it: life?

This can’t be called life, can it?

Life, in search of life. Life, missing life. We’re looking for life. That’s what life’s for. We’re searchers.

 

Is that what we should be doing with our time? Is that what our time’s for?

It’s, like, time-abuse. The abuse of our lives. Of our life-force.

What is it that really matters? That matters most? Isn’t that the question?

Instead, it’s just doom spirals. Self-hatred spirals. All our energies turned against ourselves.

 

We need to be reduced. Expunged. Punished. We have to loathe ourselves into oblivion. Undergo our own, private apocalypses.

There are parasites, feeding on us. Feeding on our negativity. Like, psychic parasites. Psychic bloodsuckers. Soul-grabbers. They’re living on us.

Where? I don’t see them.

They’re just out of sight. Just beyond our peripheral vision. They’re always vanishing into other dimensions. Or emerging from them. Only with certain .. drugs do they become really visible.

Which drugs?

Crystal meth, I think.

Where do they come from?

Some other plane. Some shadow realm. Some place of ruination.

Isn’t drunken theology fun? And stoned theology …

Stoners are always theologians.

Theologians should be stoned more often.

We need to smoke more, to further our theological investigations. Like Rastas – they have the right idea.

Jilly’s was our city of refuge, like you get in the Bible. Jilly’s was a pub of refuge. Jilly’s was the place of our feast of fools. Jilly, where we no longer have to spend time in our heads. Jilly’s, where we could always talk of the Gnostic fuckedness of it all. Jilly’s, where we could prove that we weren’t mirthless after all. That this wasn’t a world without joy, after all.

 

This is, like, the anti-gym. There’s such a thing as being too healthy.

Despair, rather than Intelligence. Horror, rather than logic.

 

Thought coming from the bottom. From the lowly. From the fools.

 

The curve of the world tends towards … what?

Bollocks. It tends towards bollocks.

Our joy in each other’s company: Cicero loved that. Our ease with one another, after so much isolation. Our laughter, after so much gloom. Our learning to be human again, after so much inhumanity. She could see it!

 

Didn’t Cicero always speak of the philosophy department as a lightning rod? As a capacitator. As a place where the antinomian flame was to be put to work.

 

What we had in common: a desire for the flash of transcendence in the immanent. For apocalyptic fire! For the burning up of the world! For instantaneous annihilation! For the divine fury! A desire for a messianism of destruction!

 

Our yearning. We were against the principle of the world, that was the thing. We knew we had to get out of it, as out of Egypt. That we needed an exodus.

Sure, Cicero knew the horror – intellectually. She knew what was coming – theoretically. But she didn’t feel it as we did.

 

Cicero might talk about shaking the world out of its contentment, its automatism. Of our leaving the closed, mechanistic system. But only we really lived against the world.

 

Cicero was all about the antinomian flame; about the otherness of revelation. But only we really felt it: the antinomian flame, the otherness of revelation.