Work in Progress

The evil’s great. The magnitude. As vast as the sky. But there’s something vaster than the sky.

 

How are we going io defeat Hell? How are we going to open heaven in Hell?

 

They’ve summoned up monsters. Demons. To help them. Or someone has.

 

It’s a question of descent. We have to descend to find it. We have to sink.

To find what?

The depths of evil.

 

The organisational managers have made contact with something. Entities. They’re making an alliance with cosmic baddies.

 

There’ll be some karmic return – that’s what they’re afraid of.

 

The abyss has opened too wide. It’s swallowing us up. It’s swallowing everything up.

 

This isn’t just about some Organisational Management move. It’s about the fate of the universe.

Such a sense of proportion.

 

The horror’s mounting. It’s … thickening. Gaining consistency. 

 

Why would organisational managers need supernatural help?

Why would demons need organisational managers? Why would they need their own pet campus?

This isn’t just about philosophy, bringing us here.

 

They want to bring everyone here – those who survive the cull. For processing. Further processing.

The survivors are supposed to live in a place like this – in a lifepod. And to die in a deathpod. And be entirely managed in between.

 

But why did Organisational Management get involved in this?

Look, the organisational managers are just the latest tool. It’s the oldest plan. It’s just an outworking of the plan.

 

Organisational Management is part of the fall of the world. Into pure mechanism. Pure function. That’s it’s evil.

For Organisational Management, everything that exists is something to be managed. It’s just stock. Just standing reserve. Including us. Including human beings.

We’re just human resources. To be upgraded. Or culled.

This isn’t real. It’s some computer game. No one can believe in this. I don’t believe in it. It’s some virtual environment. These aren’t our real bodies.

 

I have the feeling that we’re not in Newcastle anymore. We’ve passed through some stargate, or whatever. We’re on the other side of something. The normal rules don’t apply here.

 

This isn’t the real campus. It’s a spiritual campus.

This is Hell. Hell become a campus.

Hell’s cold. Hell’s freezing.

 

We’ve left the old world behind. Left history behind. Left Newcastle behind.

 

There’s some terrible heaviness. A wooziness. It’s like nothing’s happening properly. Things aren’t ending. Or beginning. Or anything.

 

It’s like we’re being played. Like something’s working through us. Programming us. Guiding us.

It’s the campus. That’s the way it operates on us. The very way it’s built.

Like it’s nudging us to go where it wants us to. To do what it wants to do. Sure behavioural psychology. They’ve worked out how to control us. The laws of human nature.

Are there laws? Even for us?

Organisational Management’s just reeling us in.

 

What if this is all there is? All there’s going to be now. What if the past just disappeared. What if it’s just Organisational Management from now on and forever?

 

Whisper some words, Io. Help us. Tell some things, Io. We don’t believe like you do. But your belief helps us.

Tell us what you told Fiver. We saw you whispering to him. Comfort us. Quote some scripture what do you say people in need. Something from the psalms. What words do you say over the dead? Because we’re dead, spiritually.

 

This is a despair-machine, their whole campus. A despair-inducing machine, the whole campus. A despair abyss. A horror machine.

 

How come we see the horror and no one else does?

That’s our role: to see the horror. To let it sink into us. To register the depths. To let it permeate us.

And then what?

 

We have to feel the grief. Give it its head. Give it its season.

 

There’s a death we have to die. A death to this. We have to let it happen.

And then what? Will we be reborn?

There’s a plan that’s greater than us. Greater than anything.

 

I think Fiver is in a protective coma.

I don’t blame him.

 

I’ll bet if we died now, we’d be reborn on this camps. We’d respawn. I’ll bet we’re immortal in some ghoulish way.

 

How deep does our despair go? How profound, our desire for repentance? All the way down? Or is there something else?

 

The Organisational Management campus cannot be. The Organisational Management campus cannot exist. It’s an outrage. And it knows it. It knows – those buildings know. The traitors rivulets: they know. The hypnotic paving stones. The lines of trees. The zones – all of them. They know …

They want our hollowness. So they can inhabit it. Possess it. That’s how they work: cavitation. Hollow everything out. And make them ready for demonic inhabitation.

 

We’re already pretty empty. There are just smoking holes where our souls ought to be.

That’s what years of part time teaching does to you.

 

They want to open the void in things. They want to release the void. That’s what this campus is for: the great emptying.

 

They’re readying us or inhabitation. For these disembodied entities – these demons, searching for a body. For someone to infest.

 

The tech stuff is preparatory. It’s about a spiritual takeover.

 

It isn’t just tech. It’s not about tech. It’s sorcery. It’s black magic. The evil fucking arts.

 

They want to make us into perfect blanks. Nothings.

They want our souls are hollow. They want us full of void.

 

They’re bringing everything here for processing, which only means cavitating. They’re pressing the restart.

 

Have the organisational managers been captured too? Are they all cavitated? Did they take over the organisational managers first?

 

They admit the nihilism. – the nothingness at the heart of all things. They want to put it to work.

 

Faith zone. What do they mean by that?

Faith in the nothing. Faith in the void. Faith in the ecumenical nothing.

They’ll void God, too. They’ll turn God into the void. They’ll evacuate God of God.

I think we’re entering the deep campus.

The deep campus?

Things are different here. Now we’ll see what the campus really is.

 

I swear this campus is repeating itself. I swear we’ve seen this before.

Maybe we’re walking in circles.

 

The snow blowing in horizontally now. In our faces.

Why do they want all this snow? All this ice?

 

This is the anti-sanctuary. This is the anti-refuge. We will not find peace here.

 

How long have we been walking? It feels like days.

 

This is a prototype. There are versions of this all over the world.

 

I saw Satan fall like lightning.

Where – where did he fall?

Into the Organisational Management campus.

What could Satan want with the Organisational Management campus?

A new base of operations. This is Satan’s own private killbox. They’re building a technological body for the antichrist. Right here.

Our survivor’s gilt. Our mediocrity’s guilt. Our shouldn’t-be-here guilt. Our here-by-mistake guilt. Our shouldn’t-be-here guilt. Our here-by-mistake guilt. Our usurped-better-people guilt. Our here-as-a-joke (as Zevi’s joke) guilt. Our should-have-been-drowned-like- kittens guilt. Our lives-predicated-on-a-lie guilt.

 

The unis lie! The unis pretence that it’s a uni. Which is can’t really be. Because it gave us scholarships. Gave us PhDs. Gave us jobs.

Our presence here is a lie. How can it be otherwise?

 

Why would the uni accept the guilt? Why won’t the uni sack us? Why won’t the uni kick us out? Retrospectively! Memory-hole our publications. Unteach our teaching. Unmark our marking. Fail all our students. Clear out our offices. Erase all our computer files. Strip us of our PhDs. Of our jobs. Make us pay back our scholarships …

 

A great purge. As if we’d never been there. Our names erased from the door. Our email addresses deleted. Our filing cabinets emptied. Our pot plants binned. The art on our office walls, thrown out. Our desk-drawers, emptied. and our publications, memory-holed. Disappeared from the archives. Progressively erased.

 

Part of the reason we hate the uni so much is because it’s tolerated us. Because that means it has no standards. That it’s utterly collapsed. That nothing about it means anything.

 

The great mistake of hiring us. Correct it at once! Disallow it! Kick us out!

 

We’re still here – isn’t that the horror? We’re actually having meetings. We actually have offices. Out smartcards work – we can actually enter the building. How is that allowed?

We actually have jobs. We’re in charge of educating young minds. Stop us! Rugby tackle us! Wrestle us to the ground! Make this world mean something!

 

You made us believe we were university lecturers. You let us play-pretend. It was like take-your-child-to-work day. To let them see what the grown ups are going.

Nimrod’s writing his great book Being and something, capital S. You know, in the tradition: Being and Time, Being and Nothingness, Being and Event. Some six hundred page opus.

So what’s it going to be: Being and what?

How about space – Being and Space. No one’s done that. A gap in the market.

Sloterdijk has. That’s what the Spheres trilogy is.

But it’s not called Being and Space, is it?

How about Being and Evil? That’s a title you could work with.

Being is evil – that’s what Cicero would say. That’s what she – or her doppelganger – was just saying on X.

Nimrod’s book is supposed to effect the great synthesis. Bringing together European and analytic philosophy. Heal the breach. Turn analytic philosophy from technocracy and European philosophy from endless textual commentary.

Sounds like Being and Bollocks.

And it’s supposed to be the fulfilment of philosophy. That will take theory into practice. Like, once and for all. Nimrod’s looking for the northwest passage between the most abstruse philosophy and politics. That will lead us from the study to the streets.

Definitely Being and Bollocks. That’s impossible …

Being and the Messiah: that’s what I’d write. Or maybe Being and Messianism.

Come on, the Messiah’s otherwise than being – everyone knows that.

That’d be the point!

You should call it Being Versus Messiah.

Our PhD dissertations. Three hundred pages – our best effort. Our final effort. The fruit of your youth – of our mid 20s … Our late 20s …

Three hundred pages: what we have done with our lives. Where it’s all led.

Three hundred pages to show us who we were. What we could do. What we couldn’t do …

Three hundred pages of compromise. Three hundred pages of our mediocrity, spun out.

Three hundred pages, that no one will read, it’s true. But three hundred pages, out there. Three hundred pages, under our names. That we can no longer delete. That we can’t subtract. That we can’t unwrite …

Three hundred pages – as permanent testament. As proof forever. Of our mediocrity. And worse than mediocrity.

The European Philosophy tribulation – the closing down of the great European Philosophy departments. The punishment of the European Philosophy righteous. The destruction of the great European Philosophy journals. Of the great European Philosophy societies. The dismantling of European Philosophy support networks. Systematically! Root and branch! They want to wipe us out.

Wine is a living thing, Cicero always said. Not this wine. This wine’s dead.

It’s worse than dead. It’s undead. This is zombie wine.

 

Notes of fetidness. Pond scum. Battery acid. General stagnancy.

Notes of zombie flesh. Of roadkill. Of gangrened flesh.

 

Can wine catch cancer? Can wine catch gangrene? Can wine rot, like a corpse?

 

Clearly pressed by zombies. By zombie feet.

 

Something must have died in the barrel.

God died in the barrel. And wasn’t resurrected.

So we’re drinking God’s corpse … Makes sense ..

 

There’s some vast cancer, spreading through all things. Through the earth! Through all the terroirs of the world.

 

Has someone poisoned the wine? Like they’re poisoned everything else.

Maybe it’s our palettes.

Has someone poisoned our palettes?

 

Maybe we’ve corrupted the wine. Due to the state of our souls. Like is known by like, and all that.

Then it should taste good to the postgraduates – they’re not corrupt.

Very true.

Postgraduates, retching.

 

The corruption of Cicero’s wine is part of a more general corruption. All of nature’s turning bad. It’s all going rancid. It’s some attack.

 

There’s a lesson for you here. Postgraduates – you, too, could turn bad. You, too, can go rancid.

 

Terroirs of Hell. Of cursed zones. Terroirs of the worst places on earth.

Of Heligoland.

I didn’t know they produced wine there. Unique.

Enwitok. Bikini Atoll.

Chernobyl wines. Fancy that.

Russian black markets. Cicero knows people.

Wow, radioactive wines! It’ll be the new thing, after natural wines. They’re actually supposed to cure us of radiation poisoning, it says here.

They’re glowing, kinda. They seem to pulse.

They’re supposed to cure of us of radiation poisoning. They work like homeopathy.

 

Grapes of literal wrath. Produced only in war-torn countries.

What must drinking become in an Organisational Management world? Drinking can’t just be drinking anymore. Not like it was. It’s more desperate. More urgent.

 

We have to drink in the opposite direction – don’t you see?

 

Drinking isn’t going to save us. Cicero’s cellar isn’t going to save us.

 

The problem is not getting drunk, postgraduates. The problem is maintaining the drunkenness. At the right level.

 

A thinking wine. A musing Wine. A wine to accompany our philosophical meditations.

 

Wine shows us the truth of the world. Shows us that we do not belong to it.

 

It’s to remind us not to retreat to the natural. Not to venerate the natural. Not to think of the wine as a gift of the soil, or whatever.