Work in Progress

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.

But no relishing or savouring wine with us, Cicero said. We don’t linger over our wine. We don’t appreciate it. Of course not! We know nothing of the rituals of social drinking. Of the ceremonies of wine.

 

Cicero brought out her wine only at the very end of the evening. Only in those early hours, when we were back in her flat.

Desecration time! she used to say. Let’s see what you can do to my wine.

 

Cicero, bringing her wines to us with reverence – of the irony. Cicero, dusting each bottle off. Uncorking it slowly, gratefully. Pouring it ceremoniously. For us! She was doing it for us! She appreciated the irony, she said.

 

Cicero, extolling the length of the taste, not that we’d understand any of that. Cicero, taking us through the unfolding sequence of flavours, and she might as well have been addressing apes.

 

Cicero, swirling her wine. Sniffing it. Commenting upon it. Wine is about gentle sipping, she said, as we guzzled ours.

 

But no relishing or savouring wine with us, Cicero said. We don’t linger over our wine. We don’t appreciate it. Of course not! We know nothing of the rituals of social drinking. Of the ceremonies of wine.

 

The wine’s rising up to meet us, in the glass, Cicero said. Even you! It’s rising up to meet you!

 

We’re bingers! Wine destroyers!

 

We’re vicious drinkers – we make a vice of drinking. We’re desecrators.

 

Nothing virtuous about our drinking! No moderate exercise of an appetite! Not a stimulus to educated conversation! No reminder that life is a blessing! No cultivation of virtue!

 

Politeness! Manners! Amicable company! We knew nothing of that when we were drinking her wine.

So much discussion, in the university corridors.

What was Cicero about? What was she up to? Why did she want to create a new philosophy department at the end of career? Why bother? What was in it for her?

We were Cicero’s scrawl of graffiti .Her own private vandalism. Her enigmatic glyph, left behind for people to interpret.

 

We were Cicero’s revenge on the apparatchiks. The small-minded. The petty-souled. We were Cicero’s last academic act.

 

Cicero’s poisoned gift to the uni: us.

Her hand grenade, lobbed straight at them: us. Her booby trap, left behind: us. Set to go off, later: us. Cicero’s legacy …

 

The rot had set in – but Cicero wanted more rot.

 

A true philistinism: that’s what we embodied. A true vandalism. A true degradation. The gutter had been allowed to flow through the university.

 

The humanities have already collapsed – that’s what none of Cicero’s professor friends understood. The humanities are already over. And we’re what comes after.

Cicero’s gone scouring the world for great thinkers. Great non-thinkers. For thinkers even more useless than we are. Totally uneducated. Holy fools. And unholy fools. She’s probably scouring the asylums right now for truly mad philosophers, unlike us. We were never perverse enough for her. Never twisted enough …

Cicero’s looking for some place that can’t be organised, that’s what I reckon. Or managed. Far from the frontlines. Looking for some place that might be overlooked, for a few years. That might escape full  O.M. implementation, for a bit. She’s looking for a place to sit out the disaster. The coming O.M. world horror.

What if she just wanted to lie out in a hammock? Sit on some beach, a senorita on her knee? Teach some beach kids maths. A life in the sun – you couldn’t begrudge her that …

Cicero’s gone full Colonel Kurtz, I think. She’s somewhere really remote. Uncontactable. Hiding out. Living out her against-the-world fantasies. Her horror of the natural. She’s set the controls for maximum perversity. Maximum demonism. She’s trying to call up the anti-messiah, or something.

Cicero’s probably plotting in the tunnels with Nimrod. Trying to work out a way to bring the O.M. towers down.

Or she’s in the outerlands beyond the stony waste, tyring to drum up some raggle-taggle army, for when the time comes. A guerrilla army. She’s in training, for whatever happens. Learning how to use small arms. And big arms.

Do you think she’s going to appear when we really need her? In our most desperate hour? Right at the end … Assume her position as Head again, now that we were older, wise – now that we’d passed through the Organisational Management trial …