Work in Progress

I wake up every morning with this, like, enormous sadness. I can hardly get up. It stays with me until it … dissipates. Like morning fog.

What am I feeling, philosopher? What’s wrong with me? Do you feel it, too?

 

We made a mistake. Somewhere, there was a mistake. Do you feel that, philosopher? I’ve felt it for years.

That there’s something wrong with it all, with … everything. That’s what I feel sometimes. That it’s all wrong.

 

We must have done something very bad in a former life, to be born into … this.

 

We need a spiritual tradition. Words to say. Ancient words in Hebrew or Latin or Sanskrit, or whatever. Ritual words.

We’re too alone in the world. We don’t have any … shelter. We’re exposed on all sides. Do you know any holy words?

I know some Hölderlin. And Celan.

So quote some Hölderlin. And Celan.

I like how Philosophy moving to Organisational Management has to be something cosmic. Has to be something wrong with, like, the entire universe. The entire multiverse!

As if the whole cosmos was about your little philosophy department. As if your department was, like, at the centre of it all.

Do you think you have a sense of proportion?

What’s happening to us is a sign, that’s all. A microcosm. Of the whole.

And what about you and I: are we a microcosm? What’s our meaning? Isn’t this a sign of the warming of relations between philosophy and Organisational Management? Positive … interdisciplinarity?

 

A mind meld, or body meld. Philosophy meets Organisational Management, in the bedroom.

But we’re more than just our subject areas.

Philosophy isn’t a subject area.

I should have know you’d say that.

What percentage are you Organisational Manager?

Do these look like Organisational Manager breasts? Are these Organisational Manager thighs? And is that a philosophy cock? Are you really a philosopher all the way through?

 

Is lust philosophical? Is … fucking philosophical? Have philosophers written about fucking? What did they write? What they approve or disapprove?

Read me something. From a philosophical book about fucking.

There’s a stage you can reach, where you see everything – the whole world – as wrong. That’s when you have to change your relationship with it all. That’s when you have to understand it all in a different way.

 

There’s a point you have to reach. A kind of trial. When you’ve exhausted the world. When you’ve looked everywhere for what you cannot find.

Is that how you know you’re a philosopher – when you reach that point? Where you want to negate the whole world, or whatever?

Pray because you can’t pray. Pray because prayer is impossible. Pray because all the prayers have been futile. Pray for prayer to be possible.

That itself is a prayer.

So we’ve been praying all along?

Vast sadness. Is nature sad? Is the sky sad because it’s the sky? Is time sad because things just keep happening and happening? Is space sad because it has to contain so much? Is vastness sad because it’s vast? Because there’s always too much?

We should advise our PhD students to switch studies. Organisational Management – that’s what they should be doing. An Organisational Management PhD, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms.

Think pragmatically, PhD students! Logistically! Swallow your pride! Save yourselves! Cross the floor!

Organisational Management’s where it’s at, PhD students. Organisational Management’s the future – it’s year zero. Begin again.

They’ll be glad to have you, probably, PhD students. New blood! New humanities blood! They’ll be pleased to see what they can do with you. How they can bring you on board. You’ll be test cases. You’ll be the measure of what’s possible and what’s not.

Our PhD students shaking their heads. No! Never!

Listen to them! Our Kinder! The Kinder of philosophy.

With half of the European Philosophy departments closed or closing! With no prospect of European Philosophy careers, not anymore!

Heidegger would have been proud. Cassirer! Mach!

Save the philosophy Kinder! Our PhD sons and daughters and non binary types!

Magnetic pole shift. My new favourite catastrophe. Elon Musk believes in it.

I’ve heard that the Earth’s magnetic field is decreasing, leaving us more vulnerable to space weather.

Space weather?

Sure. Like, cosmic superstorms. There’s no protection against radioactive particles anymore – all these neutrons. Against gamma and X-rays from solar flares. All this ionized atomic matter from these mass ejections from the sun’s corona. It fucks up our DNA.

Yeah, but the pole shift is different. You get this crustal displacement. The upper mantle liquefies. Which leads to super-strong winds and massive tsunamis. The mass distribution of the Earth will change, apparently. Which will lead to a reorientation of the Earth’s rotational axis. Day length will change. There’ll be floods. That’s why all the billionaires are building doomsday bunkers and buying up loads of land.

Which will be underwater.

What about the Age of Aquarius? Isn’t that supposed to help?

Literature just sounds privileged and racist and elitist. And passe. And vaguely fascist. It’d be outlawed, if it was any kind of threat, which of course it isn’t. They’ll just let it all fall out of print. Become unavailable. Except in digital form, and who cares about PDFs? Actual books – an anachronism. No one’s interested.

Actual literary books will seem vaguely disgusting soon. Dirty. And so will literary readers. They’ll be made to feel ashamed. They’ll skulk.

All your books. They’re dangerous now. Full of wrongthink. Full of mental poison. We know better know than any of that.

 

It’s like you spent your life dreaming of old Europe. Or being dreamed By old Europe. You’re a bad dream of Old Europe.

Did Old Europe really dream of us? Was there nothing better to dream of than us?

Europe’s tormenting itself. Europe’s turned masochist. How does it end, all of this?

 

Do you think you’re saving the world, writing in your notebook? Are you saving yourself?

You’re writing all this down in your Work, capital W. In the last book. And who will publish it, the last book?

The last publisher, of course. And it will be edited by the last editor. And its typos will be corrected by the last proofreader …

All the insignificances, added up. Put into a kind of sequence. Laid on top of one another. Like diary entries. Or blog posts. It might all add up. No – not add up. It might … accumulate in some way. Is that the word? Make all that vagueness real. Give it body.

I want to make something of it. All the days we’ve spent indoors, writing …

Speak for yourself, philosopher.

Working on something that we never really finish and never even seem to have begun. Working on the same thing all the time. Ever since we were PhD students. Working … but that’s not the word, is it?

The bits in old drafts you didn’t use. The stuff you cut. That didn’t add up to anything. Notes you took from reading. And notes you didn’t take. When you couldn’t really read. When you just … turned pages, barely following what you were supposedly reading.

Days when you couldn’t get anything done. Or when you surfed the net instead. Days when … you just looked out of the window. Or went on long and pointless walks. When you tried to distract yourself. To do anything but work.

Moments you don’t even remember. Unimportant times. Drifting times. When it was all a waste – that’s how it seemed. When it was all failure. Our failure.

The languages we never learnt. The books I never read. The notes I never took. The papers we never finished, let alone submitted. The dead hours. Hours that can’t be used. Can’t be remembered, even. Insignificant days …

That’s what I want to write about. That’s what The Work’s about. Which is a stupid title, I know.

 

And that’s what you’re writing about. It sounds like meta-writing. It’s hardly going to save the world, is it?

It all sems to pointless. Pointless writing about pointlessness …

I’m not arguing. You wouldn’t know about any of this.

Why because my life isn’t pointless?

You think it isn’t pointless.

Who decides whether it’s pointless or not. You – philosophers? Because you have a superior insight into pointlessness?

All this thirst for obscurity – I don’t know how you bear it. You’re not living in the world – in our world. And you claim it as some kind of virtue. You’ve gone missing in life. Gone AWOL. And you’re proud of it. And in the meantime, life passes you by.

What a cliché. Well, good. Let it pass me fucking by.

Because you’ve seen through life, with your superior philosophical insight …

Do we only fuck up and fuck up and fuck up? Fuck things up, ever deeper? Is that our destiny?

We’re not at the bottom yet. There’s still further to fall.

I want someone to help us. Is there someone in charge? Anyone to complain to?

This world will not last.

We won’t last. I know that now.

Dread – I know what that means. I feel dread. Of it all.

We all do.

 

So are there parallel worlds – timelines?

There’s a true timeline and then the fake one. We’re on a fake one. Which is why we can’t help but tell lies. Every word that comes out of our mouths on the fake timeline … is a lie.

Our lives are lives too, right?

How can we make our lives true?

It’s all fucking poisoned. Everything. Our blood. Our food supply. They’ve poisoned it all.

It's getting worse. We’re just falling further. We’re getting more and more entangled. How to unlie? How to unlie all the lies?

Is there a word, a single word, that’s true?

The Word, maybe. Remember, from John’s Gospel: In the beginning was the Word.

There was no Word on this timeline.

 

What is truth, anyway? Is there an experience of truth? Does true shine out? Can you see truth, like the sun emerging when the clouds pass? Does it call out?

 

Maybe I’ll become a savant. Maybe I’ll know things, philosopher. Would that make me a Gnostic? Would I become part of your gnostic club? Would I be living the world in the opposite direction?

It could really happen. Out of sheer disgust. Disgust for myself. Actually, I don’t think I can reach that level of disgust. I’ll leave that to you. I don’t think I horrify myself enough, for all my adultery. For all our affair.