Where did it come from, Organisational Management? Did it just come from nowhere? Did it just arise from nothing? Who created it? With what powers? Who said, Let there be an Organisational Management campus? Who divided order from disorder? The campus from the stony wastes?
How did they get planning permission? Who allowed this?
Postgraduates, singing: The Loneliest Postgraduate. Supervisor Blues. My Deadlines Getting Me Down. Back in Them ol’ Undergraduate Days.
Their reedy voices. The postgraduate falsetto.
Maybe all songs are messianic, postgraduates.
Except songs that are actually about Satan.
Maybe singing itself is messianic. Raising the heart. Lifting it. With a hope that’s not of this world. That comes from elsewhere. That’s the fact there is an elsewhere.
And even on such a night! Even here, the towers towering all around us. Buildings spouting cranes, all around us. Buildings, building themselves.
And your small, fragile voices, nearly lost in the wind.
We know you’re cold, postgraduates. And hungry. And that we’ve nearly run out of wine. And that there’s only a few of us, and so many of them. And that doom is almost all around us, as thick as the night. And that it seems that they’ve won so utterly. But it’s when the hour’s darkest that hope grows. What’s the quote, Sophia?
Never is God closer to you/as in the deepest doubt:/in the selfwithdrawn light of Zion.
No – not that one. Too complicated.
But where there is danger, a rescuing element grows, too.
Exactly, Sophia! That’s the stuff, Sophia!
Where there’s no hope, there’s hope after all. When the end seems utterly nigh, a new beginning appears.
We’re in a new era now, postgraduates. We’ve left history behind. This is a new epoch – a time of great spiritual danger. And great spiritual hope, too.
You’re with us in the time of the greatest uncertainty, postgraduates. The greatest darkness! As the Tribulation deepens. The last outpost of European thought in philosophy, pretty much. It’s down to us to keep the European philosophy flag flying, postgraduates.
You’re on the Nebuchadnezzar, postgraduates. Don’t forget that. The last best hope …
We know how we must disappoint you, postgraduates. We know who we are, the last guardians of European philosophy in this benighted country. We’re dreadful provincials! Obscurities!
No one knows our names. No one cites us! No one quotes from our work. No one reads our articles. No one invites us to speak at their conferences. No one’s inviting us onto editorial boards. No one’s requesting our work for journal special editions. No one’s headhunting us.
No, we’re not the people to study under, postgraduates. Our references won’t help you find jobs. No one will be impressed that you studied with us, in our department. We’re in no one’s Philosophy Gourmet Report. We’re low in the rankings.
We can protect you for a while, that’s all, postgraduates. We can help you win the last students scholarships. But that’s all.
No, postgraduates, we’re not philosophers of renown. All we can do is point you in the right direction. Guide us to what we cannot do, but that you might.
There’s still the shadow of your ardency left in us. We still know something of postgraduate intensity.
We’re not fat and complacent, postgraduates – not yet!
Easy fucking street. We’d come in from the cold. The good life! We were ready. We’d been outside. And now – we were inside.
Let the world go fuck itself. It could all go to hell out there, but it wouldn’t touch us for a bit. The outside wasn’t screaming in our ears anymore. It wasn’t, like, total battle stations for a bit. It wasn’t arma-fucking-geddon for a bit.
Standing on our own two feet. Actually launching in life. Living like other people live. We weren’t a problem anymore. We didn’t have to be explained.
A proper job! Now we could do some work -some writing. Now we could see what we were capable of.
Time! Offices! A library pass! No excuses anymore.
Yes, we were happy for a while. The whole honeymoon thing.
Cicero smiled. She knew it wouldn’t last, even as we carried out boxes of books into our offices. Even as we bought pot plants into our offices. Even as we brought art prints for the walls of our offices. Even as we perfected our office décor.
Even as we lined up our Heidegger Gestamsausgabe. Our Nietzsche collected works. Our Kant-in-German (like we could read Kant in German.) All the books we might read one day If we learned the languages …
Volumes of the Cambridge History of Philosophy: Malebranche. Scotus … Averroes …
All the lecturer accoutrements. All the lecturer accessories. All the lecturer general bits and pieces. But Cicero knew it wouldn’t last, our contentment.
Our splendid isolation. Our semi detached splendour.
For how long would we be left alone? For how long would Cicero be allowed to get away with this? For how long would she protect us?
We didn’t want to ask. We didn’t want to think about it. To give it the least consideration.
Our freedom – that was sufficient. That we had a future. That we could raise our gaze from the pavement. That we could look ahead. That we could even, God knows, look upwards.
The Northern Lights are fake. They want the sky. Just like they want the weather. This stuff is just some new kind of drone they’re working on. It’s still all being beta tested. They’re just seeing what they can do. Wait until they add in the voice to skull stuff. The stuff they tried out in the Iraq War, where the troops thought they could hear Allah telling them to surrender. They’re going to be able to stage the Second Coming, if they want to.
And why would they do that?
To make Jesus say that the New Jerusalem is imminent. By which what they really mean is the technocratic world government. Everyone will, like, hear that in their own heads. As if Jesus was talking to them directly.
Or they’ll simulate an alien invasion. And tell us that they only thing that can save us is a technocratic world government.
The Northern Lights are just nature’s just showing off. Cicero wanted us inoculate against beauty – that kind of beauty.
Don’t place your faith in beauty – natural beauty, Cicero said. Don’t look for meaning in the natural order. Not even in the Northern Lights, blazing sublimely.
Meaning’s transcendent or not at all. Meaning arrives from without – only from without.
Northern lights.
Blind – it’s all blind. Impersonal. There’s neither hate nor love. There’s no yearning – that’s just anthropomorphism.
Northern Lights.
That’s Satan blazing. I saw Satan fall to earth on the O.M. campus.
The Northern Light’s are nature putting on its display. Showing what it can do.
Or what the campus drones can do. Don’t believe any of this is real.
Are there Southern lights, too? You never hear about them. Imagine all the penguins, looking up in awe.
And still the Northern Lights. Still flashing.
They can’t be fake. It’s a message to us. God’s message.
What does it say? This is my sky, and fuck off organisational managers?
It’s saying that there’s something vaster than us – greater. Something good.
Are the Northern lights good? I just see indifference.
I swear I can hear the Northern lights. Are they supposed to make a sound? That rumbling?
That’s the drilling.
We need the great Rewind. The great Reversal. We need the Rebeginning.
We actually need to access other dimensions. Alternative realities.
How do we do that?
Sure, you can change the past. You can go back in the timeline and alter this thing or that. Like in Terminator 2 where they try to assassinate the guy who invented the Skynet chip – where they try to prevent Judgement Day, or whatever. But they can only defer Judgement Day It’s still going to happen. You can’t put off the inevitable forever.
So the O.M. campus is inevitable?
It’s a culmination. Everything they’ve been trying to do. It’s the outworking of a technological logic that’s been in play for ever since Brave New World. And We. And The Sleeper Wakes. And Metropolis.
Maybe the campus is just a campus.
Too boring. It can’t be that straightforward. Anyway, I like all our conspiracy theories.
Maybe they’re just moving philosophy to Organisational Management, and that’s all.
Come on, we need to exercise our imaginations. Cicero would approve. She liked us best when we felt confined. Cramped. When we felt up against it, which we nearly always did. When we conspiracy-theorised. When we speculated, paranoically.
She liked our conspiracy-theorising. The more elaborate, the better. The more farfetched. The more baroque. Had we ever even heard of Ockham’s razor? Apparently not. But all the better!
She liked our wild hypothesising when our blood was up. Our speculative madness. The madder the better!
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.
Work in Progress 