This isn’t our den. This isn’t a cavern where we can rest. Where can sit it out. This is just a fold of the void. There’s nothing warm or tender here. This isn’t an embrace. This isn’t a camp made just for us. We’re not to rest here. Not to regain our energy, so that we can just launch forth again.
This isn’t some burrow where we can sit things out.
There’s nothing but catastrophe. Don’t pretend. Don’t think that any of this is good, or worthwhile.
The darkness rolling and gathering – and dispersing again. The darkness, shifting in itself. Slipping in itself. Turning viscous.
The darkness, coming to itself and then releasing itself. Darkness, reforming and deforming. Releasing everything to matter, base matter. Before allowing it all to regroup. To be recomposed. To build itself back up. To clot. To block its own arteries.
Wandering in forgetting. Erring and umming, in the world’s night.
Inevitability. Endlessness. The tedium of its going-on. Of its lack of resolution. Of finality. The whole andmoreagain. The entire forevermore.
Destruction in creation. And creation in destruction.
There is no ontology of this. No metaphysics. No theory.
Nothing is. Nothing can be. Nothing was. There were never any subjects nor substantives. Nothing began, just as it will not end. There’s nothing complete – nothing finite – nothing the limits of which could be drawn. Nothing that subsists or exists or insists or just plain -sists. Nothing that is or was or will be.
Becoming in becoming. Flux in flux. The river you can’t step in twice – or once – or that you can never step into at all.
Don’t you feel safe down here? Don’t you feel protected? Like we’re being carried along in the belly of Leviathan?
Maybe we’re just hiding out. Fleeing God, like Jonah. And this is the only place we can’t hear God’s call. Only somewhere this deep. This dark. This silent.
It’s not completely silent. What’s that rumbling?
Is there supposed to be a lesson to all this? Is it supposed to be leading somewhere?
It’s a labyrinth. Everywhere’s a labyrinth for us.
The way it winds. Like the intestines. Like digestive system.
What’s being digested? Us, of course. In the belly of Leviathan.
Are those rats?
They’re pink … hairless.
Are they moles?
I think they’re mole-rats. The most disgusting creatures alive.
Can you smell something? Gas? That’s just the mole rats, farting. They’re disgusting creatures.
What’s waiting for us at the bottom? What’s waiting for us there? Is there actually a bottom? Or does the descent just go on forever?
There is no end. There is no bottom. We’re not going to arrive anywhere. We’re just going to sink, that’s all. We’re just being sucked downwards.
We can’t arrive at anywhere. We can’t be anywhere. There’ll be no refuge at the end, just as there was none at the beginning.
It’s just descent forever. More and more tunnels.
We’ve been descending for a long time. Most of our lives, we’ve been going down, that’s all. It’s been almost all descent. Almost all falling – all failing. Our whole lives have been an attempt to find our level – which is low. And isn’t that what we’re reaching now?
What have we done but fall?
But I think we’re falling faster now.
And who’s going to save us? Is it too late to be saved? Tell us, Io – is god going to save us?
And what’s going to break our fall – the earth? But the earth, too, is only falling. The earth is abyss.
We can’t rest. We can’t put our heads down. We can’t sleep. We have to be awake – dreadfully awake. Dreadfully vigilant.
These are the Bug profounds. These are the Bug channels. This is where the Bug went to earth.
This is where earth went to earth.
The Bug has to be around here. This must be the Bug’s lair, or near it.
What would the Bug be doing down here?
I don’t know. Biding his time, figuring things out.
What’s it planning – world domination?
I think the Bug just wants to sleep in peace. Like, forever.
Which one of you postgraduates is pro Bug? Which anti-Bug. What camp are you in?
The postgraduates, saying nothing.
Who’d be the pro Bug, anyway? What’s so great about the big slob? And why would you be against it? What does the Bug add to anything?
The postgraduates, mum.
The Bug’s king of the terroir. The Bug likes it dark. And the Bug doesn’t like noise. Keep your voices down.
Did the Bug eat the old philosophy department?
Maybe Nimrod is the Bug. A Bug called Nimrod.
Asking the postgraduates: do you ever come down here? For secret meetings, Bug rituals, or whatever? Do you know your way around?
Without postgraduates, the unis will grow increasingly old. Increasingly crabbed. Twisted. Gnarled, even.
The senescent uni. The twilight of the uni – that’s what we’re left with. The midnight of the uni. It’s going down, further down, and very far down …
Maybe interesting things will happen, in the final hours of the uni. Dark things will creep out of the darkness. Slither from their hiding places. Maybe there’ll be some carnival of decay. Some monsters’ ball. Some sick lollapalooza. Out will come the freaks.
But of course, we’re the freaks …
Like a crash. Like a plane has crashed here. Like philosophy crashed. Like the humanities crashed. And everything strewn everywhere.
Something collided with something. The humanities collided with reality.
We understand the humanities. Our plight is linked to that of the humanities. We are what in the humanities is entirely useless – in this world. Entirely pointless – in this world.
You are the humanities, Livia used to insist, despite our protests.
The ruins are the truth of the uni. It’s what the uni is.
Relics. Remnants. Beached. Contentless.
The melancholy of the uni, right? A secret melancholy.
That only we know.
All this detritus … All these leftovers of the humanities …
That don’t add up to anything. Just scattered pieces. Fragments.
A recapitulation of the humanities. This is the UK humanities all over again. All the phases of the UK humanities are here.
Like a tide mark on the wall. Where the humanities rose highest.
It’s what happens after time’s up. After the ride’s over. It’s about the aftermath, the aftertime, after the humanities had their fun.
It’s cold in the ruins.
We’re the only ones who can see the ruins. Who can see the old campus as a ruin. As a ruin to be. As remnants to come.
Who can understand the ruins as ruins? Who gets the ruins? Only us.
The ruins disguise themselves. The ruins appear as the opposite of ruins. To everyone but us.
We discern the ruins – at least we have that. We see the ruins for what they are. And that’s because of what we are – even as we loathe ourselves for being what we are.
In the ruins of the uni. In the ruins of the humanities.
In the shell of the humanities. In its husk. In its crater. Where it once was.
The fact that we could live in the academic ruins. Could make a life for ourselves, in the academic ruins.
We’re leftovers. Remnants. Toys in the humanities attic.
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.
It’s weirdly tropical in here. Coldly tropical. It’s not right. The seasons are topsy turvy.
Is it cold or warm? I can’t quite tell.
A microclimate. A ruins climate. A posthumous climate.
Sound doesn’t travel properly here. Retarded. Delayed.
A kind of bruising of sound. Sound smeared.
Slowness. Sound sinks here. Sound waves can’t be bothered to reach anything.
A glowing of the walls. A throbbing of the walls. A fever of the walls. They’re hot.
God what are we stepping in? Some kind of humanities mulch.
Shiva, you’re soiling your brogues.
Some kind of sweat – is that what it is?
Where did those boulders come from?
There must be some mud worms somewhere.
Like there should be dinosaurs, or something.
Fronds. Ferns. Mole rats, all curled up.
It’s fetid. Sticky.
And it’s drizzling … something.
Something wrong. This isn’t how things are supposed to be.
A bunker. An incubator. Like where the Moher alien lays all her weird eggs in Aliens.
It’s, like, aggressively damp.
A very wet void. A sopping void. A humid Nothing.
Something’s running down the walls.
Something sticky. Spermy. Ejaculatory.
Something drooly. Something that should be wiped away. As should we.
It’s realer than we are.
Were we only ever a dream of this room. A fever dream?
What is this stuff? What’s it doing?
Fermenting, I think. Like some kind of kimchi. A sauerkraut of the void.
Is this some kind of saliva? Is it digesting something?
Stuff’s, like de-evolving.
There seems to be a river. Someone left the taps on.
It seems to be meandering. Through all the … debris.
The walls are, like, bruised.
Things have hatched here. They’ve left behind their old kin.
There are mosquitos – winter mosquitos.
There are winter wasps, I think.
I’ll bet there’s some really unique terroir. I’ll bet the soil’s been watered by postgraduate tears. By the sweat of postgraduate study. By unknown postgraduate suicides, buried in the sod.
Dead postgraduate wine.
Some kind of shrine. Half submerged.
A shrine to what?
Like that sunken church in Nostalghia. Where Gorchakov gets drunk and recites poems.
So let’s recite some poems. From memory! A bit of Hölderlin. The late fragments. Auf Deutsch. Can you remember them in German? Hölderlin, Helmut? We demand Hölderlin! We must have Hölderlin!
Okay, if not Hölderlin, how about Heidegger. Some hot stuff from the Black Notebooks. About how he hates British philosophy. Where he says Analytic philosophy is Sputnik and so on …
What’s the most continental of continental philosophers to read out? Obscure as fuck. Really headwrecking.
The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline.
Oh yeah. That hits the spot. The sort of thing that could never, never be published in the UK. Except in translation by some university press, after the person was dead famous and everyone in modern languages was raving about them.
Imagine what the analytic philosopher would do if they heard that. They’d pop. They’d spontaneously combust. Spit out their pipes. Gasp. Die of heart attacks.
Start a petition, more like. Write a stiff letter to the Times.
We need to be darker. We need more despair. We need to cry out. Then something might happen.
Whose words can we use? Who wrote the most despairing words? Who wrote the most wretched things ever written.
Jandek, of course.
Leopardi.
Work in Progress 