Author: Lars Iyer

What was I going to write?, Cicero wondered. And I made the mistake of telling her. The Work, she said. The Work. I Was to write The Work and then kill myself., I said, thereby completing The Work. Thereby leaving only those pages called The Work.

A wild manuscript. Which my friends – what friends? – would publish.

 

And what would it look like, The Work?, Cicero wondered. Like Lautréamont, I said. The Chants of Maldoror. How had Lautréamont reached me in the suburbs? she wondered. How did Lautréamont strike the suburban mind: not just the fact of Lautréamont, but actually reading his pages.

 

And what was I going to write about?, Cicero mused. What would happen in my fiction? Prose poetry, I told her. Of course! What else! It wasn’t going to be about anything. It was going to be the thing.

 

It would be mantic prose, I told Cicero. Hermetic prose. Vatic prose. Half mad. Fevered. Like Artaud’s Nerve Scales. Artaud – imagine, Cicero said. How did Artaud find me in the suburbs? How did Artaud sniff me out in the suburbs? How did Artaud’s oeuvre know that I needed it?

 

What could it mean to me, this European literature? Ungaretti, all the rest? What could I do with it, this enigmatic meteorite? That had fallen practically from nowhere.

 

Those ancient Penguin Modern European Poetry volumes, on my bookshelf. Ancient paperbacks! Written under impossible circumstances. Under fascism! Under communism! Under juntas! Under suicidalism! Samizdat volumes. Volumes smuggled out. Poems memorised, to be transcribed later. Countries where literature was resistance – imagine that! Where it mattered!

 

Not knowing any of the languages of Europe. But feeling them. Not having travelled in Europe – not even interrailing. But knowing it.

An entirely imaginary relationship to the works of old Europe. Of a provincial! From the suburbs!

 

Did I still nurture philosophical hopes, in my Hatfield years? What had Hatfield got to do with Antonin Artaud? What’s the distance between Lautréamont and Hatfield? An infinite distance. An uncrossable distance.

As I travelled between campuses, for the University of Hertfordshire. As I went from the Hatfield campus to the Aldenham campus. By bus! Always by bus!

 

Was I still dreaming of my philosophico-literary work whilst living in Hatfield? Cicero wondered. Whilst renting a bedsit in Hatfield? Did I read my Lautréamont and Artaud as I travelled between the campuses of Hertfordshire University? Did I dream my literary-philosophical dreams? Did Hatfield permit that? Did Aldenham?

 

The Hatfield distance, Cicero mused. The Hatfield marooning. Earning – how much was it – eight thousand pounds a year. To be skint in Hatfield! Penniless in Hatfield! Teaching in Hatfield! And in Aldenham! Commuting between campuses, as I dreamed my philosophico-literary dreams.

 

The infinite distance between Hatfield and literature, Cicero mused. The anti-Hatfielder, that’s who I was.

 

Commuting between campuses. The Aldenham campus. The Hatfield campus. Going through St Albans. And sometimes a trip to Watford. To Watford! Of all places! Nearly as bad as Hatfield! Perhaps even worse than Hatfield!

 

The infinite tension between Hatfield and literature, Cicero mused. Between Hatfield and philosophy!

 

And carless!, Cicero mused. Bus dependent! Taking hours to get anywhere! Reading my Penguin Modern European Poets volumes on the bus. Reading Quasimodo on the bus. Reading Seferis on the bus. In a traffic queue in St Albans.

Listening to Penderecki on the bus. Whilst reading Mandelstam. Listening to Ligoti, on the bus. Whilst reading Tsvetayeva.

 

And all the while teaching in a department actually hostile to European philosophy. That set itself against European philosophy. That was infinitely suspicious of European philosophy. That thought European philosophy was dangerous. European ideas! European philosophy!

There I was, part timer. Desperate in Hatfield. Lecturing suburban youth, in Hatfield. In Aldenham. There I was, travelling from campus to campus. On the bus!

Through the suburbs. Through St Albans! On achingly slow buses. On stopping everywhere buses. Taking-it-all-in-buses. Requiring-infinite-patience buses.

 

And the one time I got a lift from a colleague from campus to campus. The one time I was spotted at the bus stop and picked up, it was by a colleague who wanted to berate me about European philosophy. Who wanted to trap me in their car to complain about European philosophy. To say how much he hated European philosophy. Who wanted to blame me, basically, for European philosophy. And to take it on me: his hatred of European philosophy.

Did I put up a good fight for European philosophy? Did I make a convincing stand for European philosophy? Did I set a good example for European philosophy? Because I was a virtual ambassador for European philosophy in a department entirely hostile to European philosophy.

 

My Hatfield years! Which doubtless drove my literaro-philosophical dreams to the greatest tension.

 

There I was, reading Mandelstam and Tsvetayeva, waiting at the bus stop. There I was reading Maurice Blanchot, for God’s sake. On the bus through Hertfordshire. From campus to campus. Winding between the scattered campuses of Hertfordshire. Not so far from London. But a million miles from London.

The suburbs! The murder of the suburbs! The anti-intellectualism of the suburbs. The anti-Europeanism of the suburbs. Bushey, where George Michael grew up. Where Andrew Ridgely grew up. Watford, Where Elton John grew up. Hatfield, where Colin Blunstone grew up.

They escaped these places! They got out. George Michael and Andrew Ridgely, listening to Joy Division and dreaming of escape! Elton John, listening to Russel, and dreaming of getting out! Colin Blunstone, forming the Zombies, and dreaming of anywhere but Hatfield!

Why did they put university campuses in these places. Why did they drop them into these places. Was it a civilising mission? Was it a higher education mission?

 

Still nursing literaro-philosophical dreams! That anyone else would have grown out of! That anyone sensible would have left behind!

 

My culture heroes. The sacred books on my bookshelves. No one should be rereading Nerve scales at thirty. No one should be deciphering Hölderlin’s later elegies as they pass into their fourth decade. No one should be busy with Philippe Jacottet and Jacques Dupin on a suburban bus. And Hélène Cixous, for God’s sake! Hélène Cixous in Hertfordshire! Didn’t Hélène Cixous just rub in the fact that I was in lost in Hertfordshire! Teaching in Hertfordshire!

 

My Hertfordshire years, Cicero mused. Not just writing philosophy papers – and I was writing philosophy papers – but busy with literary-philosophical manuscripts.

There they were, in notebooks. Handwritten! Then transcribed into Word documents. Stored on my laptop.

Those writings. Written quickly. Edited slowly. Edited down to nearly nothing. All to do with The Work, somehow. All obsessed with two words: apocalypse and idiocy. Always those two words: apocalypse and idiocy. The idiot-apocalyptic: that’s what I was writing. The apocalyptico-idiotic.

 

Cicero liked to hear about them: my literary delusions. Cicero listened intently. Cicero all but took notes. This was high entertainment, for Cicero. She’d goad me on. Ask me more.

And then? she said. And then?

She’d be eager to hear more. It confirmed something from her. She’d nod her head. Yes, she’d say. Yes. My life … the patheticness of my life seemed to confirm something, for Cicero. How delighted she was to have drawn me to Newcastle, she said.

I was perfect for it, Newcastle. It was clearly my destiny, to come to Newcastle. It was perfection, she said. She chose the right person, she said. My delusions. My determination. My not accepting reality. What would have happened to me, if I hadn’t made it to Newcastle? Which is why it was all the more important that I had arrived in Newcastle.

 

My philosophical papers, and my literaro-philosophical musings. My notebook-filling. My transcriptsions.

What was I hoping for? What kind of work would it be? Who would publish it? Review it? Who would it be for? Who would it reach?

Didn’t I understand that my time had passed. The time for my kind. For literary enthusiasts. There were still movie enthusiasts, not so long ago. But literary enthusiasts? Decades ago, perhaps.

Was a part of any literary group? Did I know any other would-be writers? Did I review books anywhere? Of course not. Had I submitted anything to be published? Had I sent anything off to anyone? No, no. What was I waiting for? Who did I think I was going to be? Was England really read for its own Edmund Jabès?

 

Did I imagine some literary coterie receiving me. Welcoming me. As one of their own. Did I think I’d shine in some salon somewhere? That I’d be taken up by a literary in-crowd? That I’d find my place, somewhere else. I didn’t even think that.

What did I think lay ahead for me? Madness – literary madness? Literary ruin? Literary penury?

What a way to spend a life? Hunched over a table. Trying to do something I was singularly ill-equipped for. That I couldn’t do. That lay beyond me. That no one I knew was interested in.

 

Literature! With everything that was happening around us! Literature – literary dreams! A hundred years too late!

And having published nothing. Having finished nothing. Did I imagine myself like Fernando Pessoa, with his chest of manuscripts? Did I think I would be discovered after my death? Except that I had barely any manuscripts. A few phrases, that’s all. Hardly whole books. A few ill written phrases. Communicating what? About what?

A few lines jotted down on the bus.

 

And no allies out there. No friends! I hadn’t met the others yet. There was no one to talk to. I was sinking – just sinking. Writing my philosophical papers, yes. Trying to get published. But with my literaro-philosophical dreams as my true focus. Only my philosophico-literary desires. Only my litetaro-philosophical determination.

 

Did I write about the part-time condition?, Cicero wondered. Did I write about the futility of writing? The fact that you had no audience? Did I write about my humiliations?

But that was too close to me. It was happening all around me. Did I write about my academic misadventures? About the impossibility of finding a full-time job? None of that. I wanted to write about something else. Anything else.

 

How could I have faced it then: the disaster of my life? How could I have written of it, confronted it? How could I have worked my way through it?

No wonder I just put it to one side. No surprise that I wanted to write about anything else.

Literature was somewhere else. Literature floated free of all these things. Literature was innocent. Literature was second innocence – a draft of innocence.

Everything could be lifted by literature. Lifted into what? Into Literature, capital L. Into the most beautiful thing. Into the farthest-away thing. Into the literary sky itself. The sky far above Hatfield.

 

Reading Hélène Cixous in Hatfield. Buying the new translations no one else bought. Reading Clarice Lispector, like a last gasp of literary literature. Reading Krasznahorkai. Books that flaunted their literariness, which is to say their uselessness, their out of timelessness. Their belatedness.

A hyperliterary last flourish. And read the encomiums on the back. Dreaming literary dreams for us. Doing the literary thing as though the literary thing could still be done.

The last literary thing. In the dying embers. And did you think you could be the last of the last of the last. A Cixous beyond Cixous. A Lispector beyond Lispector.

And dreaming of death. Dreaming of The Work, and leaving it behind. As a mystery that would never be resolved. And that no one would even be interested in – not really. Dreaming of an oblivion far greater than the Comte de Lautrèament ever knew.

 

The pain of suburbanism, Cicero mused. The pain of Englishness. My pain. Chasing after what was not for me.

And ye perhaps I would find a way of writing that was true to my suburbanism, Cicero said. Perhaps it was a matter of writing the distance between the realities of my life and what Literature was.

An English distance, perhaps. Write that! Live that!

 

A post literary literature – that’s what I should write, Cicero said. A literature without literature. That marks the place where literature should be. That is full of the great names, and the distance of the great names. That takes place, all of it, between you and Literature, capital L.

Other-people’s-ideas manipulators. Other-people’s-ideas appliers. Distorters! Betrayers!

Ideas we barely understand! That we barely even grasp!

Ideas that we have to dumb down. Simplify. That we distort. Rip out of their context. Ideas that we have to translate into our language of stupidity.

Ideas that we explain and thereby explain away. Ideas that we have to simplify and hence dissolve. In the acid bath of our witlessness!

 

Idea shunters. Idea pushers. Idea opportunists. Idea seizers. Idea introducers, which is to say, simplifiers.

Fishers of ideas in the European pond. Servers up of ideas for the Anglophone world.

 

Panners for idea-gold in European waters. Career makers! Ready to be introduced. To be contextualised. Ready to be explained in simple Anglophone sentences.  A new idea for the marketplace of ideas.

 

We’re ideas-ventors. Travelling ideas-merchants. European ideas, of course! Not our ideas!

We’re idea-reframers. Recontextualisers. Presenting our wares in journal articles and conference presentations.

 

Idea stealers. Put them to work.

Plucking out European thoughts to add to the theory pick ‘n’ mix. Ready for the Anglo academy to put them to work. To inject new life in the Angloworld academy.

Career making ideas. Career-makers, some of these ideas. Bright new things. Baubles. Ready for the discerning educationalist or art historian of musical theorists to put to Anglophone work.

The latest thing! The newest idea! Ready to adorn some new introductory volume.

 

We know the division of labour: the Europeans think, and we introduce.

The Europeans produce ideas and we contextualise them. We present them to our Anglophone peers.

Europe is the element of ideas, and the Anglophone world the element of introductions to ideas.

Europe is where ideas swim in the wild, and the Angloworld is the place where ideas are caught – snared. Domesticated.

We’re farmers of European ideas, essentially. We make them grow in Anglophone soil. We make them useable for the humanities! Ready to be put to work, by all the other disciplines! Ready for art historians, for architects, for musician, for fine artists, for geographers! Ethnographers! God knows, even business studies! That’s the role of European philosophy.

That’s our role. That’s what we’re for. Like worker ants. Drones. Taking an idea from here and placing it over there. Reframing it. Rephrasing it. Contributing to the great Anglophone academic labour.

 

We’ve no ideas of our own, not really. Nothing to say. But the ideas of others!

Writing introductory books: that’s our aim in the academic factory. Explaining difficult things: that’s what puts our philosophical skills (such as they are) to work. That’s what gives us a meaningful role in the division of humanities’ labour.

Packaging ideas. In the right way! In an attractive way! In introductory books that are readable by anyone. In gaudy paperbacks. In collect-‘em-all series. That you can just line up on the shelf. As a veritable encyclopaedia of contemporary European thought. Of what’s happening now in Europe. The latest stuff! The new frontier!

Making sure that the Which means the Anglophone world never falls behind. That it never has to play catch up for too long. Feeding European ideas through the Anglophone philosophy mill. In digestible form. In palateable form. Standardised. Ready for consumption. Ready to be applied.

There can be no letting ideas stay n obscure European treatises, hundreds of pages long. Under off-putting titles. In hardback. Ideas need to be brought out into the open. Ready to be harvested as Theory. Ready to be thrown together with other ideas in Theory bricolage. In the great Theory pick ‘n’ mix.

 

We’re gathering pollen from the finest European flowers. Producing Anglophone honey.

 

There are the translators. Who first make ideas available. Then the introducers – our role. Then the appliers.

So long as there’s new French thought – it’s most French thought. So long as there’s something exciting from Paris – it’s usually Paris. So long as there’s something to keep the humanities’ wheels turning.

And it doesn’t always have to be contemporary. It doesn’t have to be absolutely new. Only to new to us, in the Anglophone world.

There are crumbs from the French philosophical feast that we’ve missed, in the passed. There’s stuff that fell from the table. Thinkers Deleuze refers to. Or Serres – whoever. We’re here to complete the picture. To make sure nothing’s overlooked.

We’re in the deciphering department. We’re in the explanations game. Rendering explicit: that’s our job. The clarity of representation, as opposed to the fire from heaven. We’re about clarity. Short sentences.

Making sure that there are no obscure corners left. Nothing overlooked. Nothing left behind, from the European feast!

 

The Parisian experimentium. The Parisian ideas incubator.

We never go there. We’ve barely even been there. We don’t speak French, let alone Parisian. Paris would be quite impossible for us. We’d explode if we ever went to Paris.

 

Everything in its place. Everyone doing what they’re good at. The English are explainers. Makers-clear. Renderers-explicit. Cutters and dryers: that’s what we are. Servers up of difficult things.

We know our place in the marketplace of ideas. We know our role in the international circulation of ideas.

 

Whole careers can be made from a few Parisian crumbs. There are books to be written. For prestigious presses! You can make your name as an [insert name here]-ian. As an A-ian or a B-ian. As a specialist in the thought of C, or D. Which can work very well when the stock in A or B or C is rising! When D’s work is receiving a lot of attention.

Plan well! You could be ahead of the curve. Ready with a raft of articles on E or F. Ready to introduce a volume on the thought of G. On the politics of H.

Explaining where this thinker came from. What that thinker is about. To link them to the already familiar big names. Making a case for their place among the Big Beasts of European philosophy.

 

Of course the Parisians know nothing of us. Of our Anglophone underlabouring.

They have no idea what we’re doing to their thoughts. Where we’re taking them.

They have no idea what they mean over here. Who they’ve become over here. What keen young Anglophoners make of them.

How their thought’s been put to work in every kind of discipline. By the busy little Anglophoners! In all the busy Anglo university factories. Where everyone has to continuously churn out articles! Where everyone has to incessantly bid for research money!

They can’t grasp the Anglophone ecosystem. The books that spring up around them. Around their oeuvres. Around their names.

And what’s being done in their names! The thought-crimes being committed, in their names! The thought-barbarisms being perpetrated in their name!

We invite them over to keynote our conferences. They stand there blinking. Who are all these idiots? they wonder.

 

Anglophone European philosophy is basically not very good history of philosophy. The history of ideas, really. Philosophising as summarising the thoughts of others.

We’re the epigones of the real European philosophers. Their imitators. Doing the Levinasian thing. Or the Deleuzian thing. Like new dance crazes. New dance moves. Doing it this way. Doing it that way Doing the Deleuze. Doing the Simondon. And doing something else when that gets tiresome.

We’re covers band. Doing our own crap versions of the European ideas.

Tribute acts without the charisma. Without the flair. Without brilliance of style. Without complexity. Without European depths.

 

‘Explaining’ them, the European greats. ‘Clarifying’ them. ‘Introducing’ them. ‘Contextualising’ them. ‘Clarifying’ them.

Making the ideas applicable. Relevant. Selling them on the ideas market. Making our own names as introducers and contextualisers. As backers of the right European horses. At pickers-out of Zeitgeist-ready thinkers.

Seeing if we can become the [insert hitherto-unknown French thinker here] guy. Corner the market. Publish THE book on [as-yet unknown French thinker.] Becoming the professor-expert on [just-translated French thinker.]

The philosopher is always a not-yet philosopher. A not even philosopher.

The philosopher can never coincide with herself. Philosophy is the ache – the desire for philosophy. Philosophy is the full knowledge that being a philosophy is impossible. That you’ll never become what you seek to become.

Philosophy is the perpetual as not. You never philosophise as a philosopher. And we knew that.

Which is why idiocy is so important. The experience of idiocy.

 

Idiocy belongs to philosophy. It’s the most intimate part of philosophy. It’s the core of the philosophy. And weren’t we the truest proof of that?

Always experiencing ourselves as having nothing to say. As having no ideas. No means by which to express them. As never being entitled to philosophise.

Never wanting to pass ourselves off as philosophers. Never playing the part of the philosophical master.

 

The point is to affirm idiocy. Not to see it as a deficiency. Not to see ourselves as lacking anything.

The completeness of our stupidity: that’s what we expressed in our best moments. In our joy. Stupidity without apology: that’s what we became. The happiness of idiocy: it is possible to speak of that? Stupidity attained. Lived.

 

Dwelling in idiocy. A whole ethos of idiocy, a way of perceiving and engaging with the world, with ourselves, with others …

 

Perfect idiots. Beautiful idiots. Beautiful in our idiocy and because of it.

 

You have to know how to read idiocy. There’s a whole idiocy’s hermeneutics.

Perhaps it takes a non-idiot to understand it. A non idiot standing outside it. Who’s not part of it. Who doesn’t dwell within it.

Which is why Cicero never let herself reach the plane of total drunkenness. Why she held herself back. Why she never entered idiocy’s immanence. Idiocy’s completeness. She could never disappear into idiocy without remainder. As we could! As we did, almost nightly!

 

Weeping idiocy. With tears of joy. With tears if idiot-joy, running down our cheeks.

 

Idiocy’s the answer.

Idiocy’s the question. A duh. A scratching the head.

 

Great is erring, that’s what Heidegger wrote. Great is the uh-ing of the perfect idiot. Great is the duh-ring of the truly stupid.

It’s all about governing the future. Measuring the future! Analysing the future! Acting upon the future!

We’re at an inflection point. It’s all about preventing further breakdown and perpetual crisis. .. It’s all about trying to uncover a better, more sustainable, peaceful future for our people and planet …

We have to protect the needs and interests of future generations. Their well-being! It’s all about ensuring the future we want.

It’s all about transformation and renewal! About building and striving! About continuous and endless advancement towards the right things! Nothing can stand still! It’s all about paths and steps and road maps! About keeping pace! About acceleration!

The future depends on us. We have to demonstrate that we have the right amount of knowledge, foresight, skill, predictive capabilities to shape it in advance.

 

Only careful and continuous management can save us. A vast tutelary power. Defusing tensions. Resolving conflicts. Overseeing the pacific settlement of disputes.

 

The Organisational Management blueprint! The Organisational Management schema! The Organisational Management future, waiting to be opened before us.

Organisational Management has expanded human dominion. Into the future!

Seeing further than others: that’s what the Organisational Management can do. And authority rests with the one who sees farthest. Who see better than us! And know better than us! And want the best for us, as Organisational Management does …

Organisational Management can see better than us! It can model the future.

This is how Organisational Management grounds its power. This is how it secures its legitimacy. This is how it makes good on its lack of grounds. The absence of any moral justification.

The culmination of the scientific revolution! Of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment! A veritable revolution! A great leap forward!   

The future is a project: their project. There must be no alternative to what they’ve planned to happen. They had dibs. They have the AI. They have the Science. All our institutions must be aligned! All our organisations! Our networks! Our systems! Our fora! For our own good!

 

It’s all about our global neighbourhood. An agreed global framework for actions and policies! A strategy for global governance! To coordinate policy. For exploring areas of common concern!

Everyone and everything is to included in the general project of material and moral improvement.

It’s about improving our moral sensibilities. Our spiritual advancement! They want to lead us to salvation. Under their benevolent guidance!

 

They are in sole possession of the truth. No one must be allowed to corrupt the flock! Everyone must be brought into the Organisational Management sheepfold. Every head must be accounted for.

There must be no strays! No sickness in the head! Some can be rehabilitated. But some, regrettably, must be exiled. Excluded! If the interests of the good and the whole are to be served.

 

There is no authority other than Organisational Management. There is no source of truth.

This is why they fight so hard against misinformation! Disinformation! Malinformation! This is why they’re seizing new powers to combat countervailing narratives!

 

The absolute necessity of global governance … Problems far exceed the capacity of any particular state …

Inspecting the model.

It doesn’t show the underground levels.

Yes it does. The Apex detachable.

So it is. It just goes down and down.

The whole campus is just aching to be destroyed. Don’t you think? These towers …

Who by? Who would destroy it?

I don’t know. The people who live outside it. Zombie hordes. Whatever.

There are campus shields. Designed to keep anyone we want out. They’re really just in case. They aren’t actually activated yet.

What are you so afraid of? You’re gearing up for some emergency. Or you’re going to bring it about – that emergency.

It’s supposed to be a stronghold, the campus. In case things go bad. A place of last resort. For whenever what happens out there, happens. We’ll be safe. Or the campus will be.

And then you can go into full organising and managing mode. Organise or euthanise, right?

We’re not actually evil.

What’s the threat that you’re dealing with? What’s the risk? What’s happening out there that the rest of us don’t know about? What do you know that we don’t? Have you made First Contact, or something? Are the magnetic poles about to shift?

These are angry times, philosopher. They’re planning for collapse, I know that. The billionaires. All the bigwigs, who fly in. They do all these tabletop simulations here. Like, what would happen in food production collapsed.

If they made food production collapse, you mean.

If we lost all the sources of energy.

If we blew up the pipelines, you mean.

If there was total financial wipeout.

Which there will be.

If there was nuclear war.

Which they’re trying to provoke.

All these apocalyptic scenarios.

Manufactured apocalypses. Very convenient.

Such a cynic.

What the Plaza for?: that’s what I want to know.

It’s a bit big, I suppose.

You fell into a hole called philosophy, and now you’re never getting out again.

Maybe we could get Organisational Management itself to fall in.

How?

Ask a question so great that it devours the campus.

Second tier friends.

I like your optimism. No, really, I do.

Would my 15 year old self be proud of what I am doing?

This is a now moment for me.

I think I’m incapable of companionship.

Pillowtalk.

Are we wasting our lives? Tell me we’re not wasting our lives.

So on-brand.

Can’t we just talk about nice things?

Is there a pill for this?

Routed into the spam filter of life.

Having a moment of lucidity.

I feel like I’m unravelling. 

I’m drunk, but not enough.

I’m sorry – I have to be alone. For, like, years.

You can actually live off hatred.

‘Do you have a love life? I don’t even had a like life?’

I love parties. Going to them. Preparing for them. Giving them. Recovering from them.

White jeans were never in. You can’t carry them off. No one could.

Wallpapered his room with quotes from Bataille.

This is the future. This is what our grandchildren will be smoking.

I could use a really good orgasm. In a sports-fuck kinda way.

I’m getting a chub just thinking about it.

Thee temple of postgrad youth. Sex, magick and so on.

What are you wanking off to nowadays?

Tell her you’ve got a raging boner with her name on it.

Notorious horn dog. Like a walking hard on.

Knit your own orgasm lesbian bullshit.

There’s just no place for us in this world.

We used to fuck our golden Retriever. He was consenting.

Gun dogs are very good for blow jobs. Very soft mouths. Bred to be delicate with prey.

I might buy a sexbot. Clicking on 35 coolest robots to have sex with.

Scratch the surface, and there’s just, like, more surface.

Please rise above yourself.

You’re a barrel of monkeys.

FUK BOI numberplates.

Like slapping God across the face.

All-hoody wardrobe

Ride the bravery train.

When you kiss for the first time, and you feel your entire body is on vibrate.

Porking on a semi-regular basis.

There are wines you should drink on your knees,

 

Dionysius enters the grape and transforms it: that’s how the Greeks understood fermentation. It’s the Greek version of transubstantiation.

Dionysus entered the wine and died, more like.

 

The drunkenness of Noah: we should ponder that. Run a seminar on it.

 

Nothing to excess: that’s what was inscribed above the gate of Apollo’s temple, in Delphi, along with Know Yourself.

Only to excess: that was our motto. Fuck yourself.

 

The perfect balance of stalk and fruit. The soul, speaking through it.

 

The cellar in which her wines lay dreaming.

 

The divine orderliness of Cicero’s wine.

 

This wine flows like slime. Like drool.

Beelzebub’s drool.

It’s sticky.

Our disappointment. Our solemn walks along the shore (we’d long since moved to the coast, by then.) Along Longsands. Kind Edwards’s beach. Up to St Mary’s Lighthouse. Up to Seaton Sluice. All the way to Blyth, sometimes.

Our mourning ferry trips, from North Shields to South Shields and back again. Our grief chips, eaten in North shields, looking out at the waters. Our mussels of sorrow. Our cockles of melancholy. Our crab rolls of infinite desolation. Our fish ‘n ‘chips wakes.