Work in Progress

Driss, reading. Signs of a disintegrating civilization. This should be good. Abandon – reckless and self seeking hedonism.

–  Us on a bender, basically, Io says.

Truancy, sense of drift …, Driss continues.

–  Daydreaming in meetings, Barbarossa says. Woolgathering at awaydays.

Vulgarity and barbarism in manners, Driss reads. Vulgarity and barbarism in the arts. Vulgarity and barbarism in philosophy –

– That’s our department, Io says.

Archaism …, Driss reads.

Archaism? Io asks.

The veneration of old stuff, Barbarossa says. Like our love of Old Europe.

A soulless utilitarianism at once homogenising and vulgar, Driss continues.

Well, we all know what that’s about. Just give us the highlights, Driss.

Standardisation of life that levels and flattens, Driss reads, flipping the pages. Growing suicide, mental disease and crime … Weariness spreading through larger and larger numbers of the population … A disintegrating academic culture.

The Organisational Management campus knows no bounds.

That’s because the Organisational Management campus is within us.

 

What kind of civilization would build a campus like this?

This is the architecture of soul death. A satanic architecture. What technologies of soul destruction are they using?

Aren’t we supposed to approve of brutalism? Ideologically?

It’s not even brutalism. It’s too nice to be brutalist. It won’t even admit its utter shitness.

 

At least we can talk about how much we hate it, this world – that’s something, isn’t it? At least it allows us that.

It likes it. It likes to mock us by indulging it. By letting us say whatever we like. And then showing total indifference. Showing that resistance is futile and laughable and stupid.

And that’s it’s totally accounted for – that’s the thing. That it’s expected – that it’s all calculated. That it’s all organised and fucking managed.

 

The great futility: that’s what we’re supposed to be reminded of. Our futility. And everything does remind us of that. All their smiles. Their welcomes. All the nice things they tell us are just to remind us of our total impotence. That this is how it is and how it will be, now and forever.

 

They believe that they’re doing it for the good – the managerial good, which is the only good around now. There’s a self-righteousness about them. That’s part of the hideousness.

 

The totalitarianism hasn’t even begun, not really, and it’s already insufferable. I mean, it’s not even happened yet.

But it will, and we know it will. That’s the problem. It’s part of the law of the world.

 

I can’t live in dread. Like perma-dread. I think we should kill ourselves now. We’ll only kill ourselves sooner or later. It’s only a matter of time. So why not kill ourselves now?

It’s some stupid curiosity keeping us alive. We want to see what the horror looks like, though we know exactly what it’ll look like. Not sure why …

 

Where will it fail? When will it fall apart? When will it come down? It’s stupid, but it feels, like it has to end. It has to be destroyed. Just of itself. Because, because – it’s wrong. Because of some law of the world.

 

How long do dictatorships last? Years? Decades?

But this is a new kind of dictatorship, right? The whole digital thing. The control grid’s tighter.

 

When will we snap? At what point?

Haven’t we snapped already?

 

They’ll philosophy-whisper us. Breathe into our philosophical nostrils, or whatever. Stroke our philosophical manes. Give us philosophical sugar lumps. Reassure us. Make it all seem okay.

 

They’re not bright, we’re agreed on that. They’re positively stupid. But they have that manipulative intelligence. That sly thing. That ratlike cunning. All insidious. All opportunistic.

 

When are they going to come for us?

They’re already got us, idiot. This is already a prison. This is already death.

 

So they allow us to teach this stuff?

Of course they do. Why wouldn’t they?

I’d prefer them raiding us. Holding us at gunpoint. I’d prefer that. If they saw us as some threat.

Because they know we’re not actually threat. The students never attend class, never listen. They’re not interested. And they’ve already full to the brim with whatever bullshit they learnt at school. They’re saturated. Waterlogged. Nothing else can get in. It just runs over the surface.

 

Are we the resistance?

Only if they want us to be the resistance. And they probably do. They probably brought us here to have a resistance. To enjoy having a resistance. It was a kind of gift to themselves: a resistance. To see what we’d do. Whether we might surprise them.

So vive le resistance, right?

 

Was there ever a ‘before’? Was it always this? I can’t remember anymore.

 

They brought us here, to this campus, for a reason.

What reason? To keep your friends close, but the resistance closer.

Lightning – just came out of the air. Striking down. Can lightning strike out of the air like that? Just, like, out of the darkness? There are no clouds, nothing.

 

Cicero spoke of the department as  lightning rod. As a channeller of lightning. A capacitator, or something. What does that mean?

That we turn the lightning into something. Into philosophy, maybe.

 

And what is the lightning?

Transcendence, right? The transcendence of NOTHING – in capital letters. NOTHING as transcendence. The divine NOTHING. The nothingness of God … Cicero couldn’t find it by herself. You have to be attuned, or whatever.

And were we?

She hoped we were.

 

Why us? Because we were drunk and disorderly, basically. Drunk in charge of philosophy. And full of the hatred of the world – this world. The middle class world. Which she always encouraged.

We were her proteges, right?

She’d say she was our protege.

And what were we supposed to do with this lightning? With the divine NOTHING, or whatever?

Transmit it. Make something of it. A philosophy. A life.

 

Cicero wanted to use our despair. Our disgust. She wanted to use the fact that we had no hope in the world, in the world’s future. That the world, in its entirety, was as an obstacle to us. To our hopes.

Our hopes could only pass through the destruction of the world, that was the thing. Cicero saw that. We were her apocalyptic proteges. Or she was ours.

Things are passing through us. Great things. That we cannot seize. That are not ours.

Vast horrors. Vast dreads. And vast goodnesses. Plural. So many of them. That act through us. That act upon us. That we channel.

Is it God? Is God passing through us?

It’s the opposite of the hivemind. The opposite of the universal computer.

 

This is some new phase. Something new us happening. Something vast. And through us. Some turn of the spirit. Something … metaphysical. Some new embodiment of God.

A great … beneficence. That will bring light to our dark hearts. Light from within, opening through us. Out of us. Until we’re all illuminated. Shining.

 

What’s the opposite of a vampire? What’s the opposite of a ghost? What’s the opposite of a ghoul?

 

And we’re crying and crying, and don’t know whose tears they are. And we’re moved by things – great things – that we don’t understand.

 

Great things are happening. Good things. Bells are ringing in heaven. Bells are ringing throughout the Creation.

 

The kingdom of God is real and it is coming. No: it’s already here. It always was. It’s our world. It’s what our world also is: the kingdom of heaven. I believe that. New Jerusalem is already here.

 

We are instruments of something larger. There are other … dimensions.

Other universes?

No … just higher dimensions. Above this one. And we’re ascending. We’re climbing higher.

Is that true?

 

Light from somewhere else. Can’t you feel it moving shining you?

I can.

 

This is a new age. A new epoch. Of the holy ghost, or whatever. We receiving something. If we let ourselves. If we don’t lie. It we don’t take their poison.

 

They’re already in hell, the poisoners. The liars in charge. They’re already being tortured, which is why they torture. They’re full of fear, which is why they must cause fear.

They’re lashing out because they’re damned. And because they know their damnation.  

 

You can go mad from the truth – did you know that? No – from the disjunction between the truth and this world. That’s what sends you mad.

 

You have to speak the truth. Just speak, in truth. And you will be spoken. Think, in truth. And you will be thought. God will speak with you and think with you. Until what you are is a word of God. A thought of god.

 

None of this is real. We have to look beyond this world. Have to look through it. To the other dimensions. The higher ones.

 

Will the evil empire fall?

It’s falling now. So many of us are waking up. So many, opening their fucking eyes. The light is reaching us.

 

Are there words for this? Is there a way of speaking about it?

If we just speak truly and sincerely, it will speak with us.

What will it say?

Exactly what we say. Nothing more, and nothing less.

 

People have come to same conclusions, independently of each other.

Good people are coming together now. Something is good is happening.

The emergency is over.

Is it?

It’s becoming something else.

 

Is evil real?

Evil’s thick. Evil’s heavy. Evil chokes.

Evil lies. Evil steals the words you would want to say. Your own words.

Evil smothers. Evil dims. Evil blinds. No – evil makes you see everything as evil. It makes you see everything as lies.

Look upwards. We know that it’s from there it will come. From on high. From the most fucking high.

We know what to look towards. We know what to seek in the sky. We know the clouds will part one day.

 

We have instincts. We know, somehow, what it is to live. Where to turn. Where to look.

 

Have mercy on us: isn’t that what we say, over and again? Have mercy. Help us. Lift us up.

 

We need something to face. We need something to See. Something to refresh the eyes.

 

We’re not totally dead, after all. We feel dead, which means we’re not dead. We feel suicidal. But that means we’re not suicidal.

We aren’t dead yet. We aren’t lost yet – not totally lost. There’s somewhere to address our prayers. There’s a direction. The light is coming through. Will it reach us?

 

Lies and poison are the law. There’s nothing else. The world is lies and poison. Nothing more. This is the age of lies and poison.

 

How come we see through it all? What is it about us? Why do we have such advanced lies-and-poison detection systems?

It’s just obvious to us: the lies, the poison. We see right through it? But how?

 

But they don’t know what to do with us yet. They haven’t worked us out yet. But they will. They haven’t understood our incentive structures. But they’re trying. They don’t know our drivers. But they’re investigating.

 

Organisational Management is really about zombies. Their plans are plans for zombies. And we’re not actually zombies, for all that we say we’re dead and so on.

They can only really operate on the middle class, that’s the thing. The middle class are so much more predictable. Their drivers are so much more obvious. Their incentive structures.

They can only organise and manage the world if they turn everyone middle class. Give them middle class concerns. Deferred gratification and status anxiety and that sort of thing.

That’s how they’ll kill off all spontaneity, all unpredictability: by making everyone middle class.

 

The organisational management of the mind: that’s the middle class, Cicero said. The colonisation of the mind.

 

Do you remember Cicero’s faith in the working class? The working class is exactly where they’re not looking, the rulers of the world, Cicero said. The working class is where the revolution will come from, if it hasn’t already broken out, Cicero said. But by the working class, she really meant the non-working class. The welfare class. And by the revolution, she really meant general irreverence and piss-taking.

 

Working class piss-taking, that’s what will save us, Cicero said. Working class irreverence. Eye-rolling and piss-taking and larking about. not taking it all so Seriously (with middle class seriousness.) Not being so pious (with middle class piety.) Never really being on message (with the middle class message.) Not being as focused as you should be. As you’re supposed to be. Not building a career. Not planning ahead. Not anxious about things (with middle class anxiety.)

I’ve had this total feeling of dread. Spiritual dread. Vaster than anything.

I’ve never felt this before. It’s like evil is real, tangible. And it’s horrible. And terrible. It’s an awakening to evil. and that’s been dreadful. I could never have imagined so much evil …

 

And suddenly I understood that I was in desperate spiritual need. I’ve never felt that I was in desperate spiritual need – not before. I’ve never suffered from being in desperate spiritual need. And there I was, in desperate spiritual need …

And crying and crying. That’s what I was doing. In desperate spiritual need and crying. And when I began reading Susan Taubes, I realised that she was a woman likewise in desperate spiritual need. Reading Susan Taubes writing about Simone Weil and writing about Martin Heidegger and writing about the gnostic currents in their work, I realised that she, too, was a woman in desperate spiritual need. And that the thinkers she wrote about were likewise in desperate spiritual need. Which they resolved in different ways. Which Simone Weil resolved by starving herself to death and Martin Heidegger by basically joining the Nazi party. But only because they, too, were in desperate spiritual need. And I wasn’t about to starve myself to death or join the Nazi part (or its equivalent.) And I wasn’t about to drown myself, like Susan Taubes. So what was I to do, with my desperate spiritual need.

 

It’s like God’s turned his face away from the Creation. As if God has become disgusted with the Creation. As though God no longer feels bound to his promise. To the covenant …

Because the Creation itself has become blasphemy. Everything about has become a desecration. We’d been given something, and we’ve perverted it. We turned the world from it was, from what it was supposed to be.

 

Poison and lies. And murder! So many of us! They want most of us dead, the maniacs. The poisoners. The liars. They want to fuck with our genes. They want us changed. They don’t want us to be human anymore.

And I, who’d always thought of myself as a misanthrope, suddenly felt a great love of everyone. I felt a great love of all the people around me. All the people they want to kill. Or alter. Or damage. Or make into some new species. That they own, essentially.

 

And God, seeing all this, had turned his face away. We don’t know what that means, not yet.

The world is too corrupted. Too bad. And we’re too evil. And God no longer watches over us.

It’s a great change, A shift. One that’s barely visible, barely noticeable. Because so few of us think of God. Because so few of us miss God.

 

We’ve left spiritual history. We’ve left it behind. We wandering in the darkness now. All alone. Only we don’t know we’re alone., not really. It hasn’t dawned on us, what it means to be alone.

But it’s dawned on me. I understand, what it means to be alone.

And I didn’t believe in God before. I was an atheist before.  And now I know that God has gone. That God was here, and now God is gone.

 

And God’s not supposed to turn his face away, but he has. God’s supposed to love every hair on our heads. God’s supposed to noticed the fall of every sparrow, or whatever. But God’s turned his face away. Because we didn’t keep the covenant, or whatever.

And I didn’t even know what that meant, before, before. But I know now.

Just when our need for God is at its greatest, God disappeared. God turned his face away. Just when we were overwhelmed by the poison and lies, God turned his face away. Just then.

And that was because we don’t even know that our need for God is at its greatest. That’s because we barely know that we’re overwhelmed by poison and lies. God has turned his face away, and we don’t know it. It means nothing to us. But it’s true – and even the highest truth: God has turned his face away.

 

And I realised that there are only poison and lies because God turned his face away. That this is what happens when God turns his face away. And I saw that the poison and lies have taken over the word, because we no longer look upwards. And that it’s because we don’t look upwards that God has turned his face away.

 

Just this huge feeling of loss. I, who had never really had God had come too late for God. And reading Susan Taubes. And reading her reading Simone Weil, who wrote all about God’s absence, and claimed that God was present in God’s absence, and that God was there by not being there. And reading her reading Martin Heidegger, who wrote all about dereliction and finitude, and never really understood or admitted the religious dimensions of what he wrote, and that he was really writing about the desertion of God and the disappearance of the last signs of God.

And reading Simone Weil’s later notebooks, those terrible, beautiful notebooks, written when she was in London, working for the Resistance. Those bits of maths and bits of translation from Greek and from Sanskrit written at night. And these beautiful lines about God being here when he was not here that Susan Taubes commented upon. And the absent presence of God. Those pages in which, in the neatest, most upright handwriting, Simone Weil was expounding her own religious philosophy, her own understanding of Christianity.

And reading Heidegger’s wartime writings, to which Susan Taubes didn’t have access, about mechanisation and massification and technologization and terrible things about cosmopolitan Jews. Reading Heidegger’s wartime essays, which Susan Taubes knew only in part, about technological enframing, about the obliteration of nature’s own self-revealing, and about the multifaceted mystery that is the earth. Which was really, Susan Taubes, all about the disappearance of the divine! About the obliteration of the holy! Which were really a Gnostic treatise!

 

And back then, I didn’t know, not yet, that God had essentially turned his face away, and that that was what Susan Taubes was writing about: God basically turning his face away. Back then, I wasn’t ready for the thought that the world had been abandoned to total nihilism. Oh I thought I knew what that meant, but I didn’t yet understand what that meant. I didn’t understand the nihilistic depths of the poison and lies. Which meant I didn’t know the opposite of the depths of poison and lies. I didn’t know what the word, God, meant. I didn’t know what God’s face was. And had been. And I didn’t understand what it meant to write, as Susan Taubes did, that God had essentially turned his face away.

Listen to me, talking like this. I didn’t know what it meant to talk like this. And I still don’t know!

 

So that’s why I need to read. And study. To find a way to talk about what has happened. About what has befallen us. That’s why I’m reading Susan Taubes reading Simone Weil and reading Susan Taubes reading Martin Heidegger. And why I’m reading those pages so urgently and intensely.

Because I need to know that there’s something more than poison and lies. And because Susan Taubes, at her best, knows that there’s something more than poison and lies.

 

Some writers, some bodies of work, are like rubber rings. Some writers, some oeuvres, appear to you only after the shipwreck. Amongst the flotsam and jetsam – amidst all the rest of the cultural junk. You grab at something and you’re not sure why. You cling onto to something, and don’t understand what it is. What you need.

They’ve seen worse, I thought, as I reached out for Mitteluropean thinkers. They knew more poison, more lies than we have, I thought, as I read my Mitteluropean thinkers in desperation. They lived amidst the greatest horror I thought, as I read the pages of Susan Taubes, for the first time. And they were looking for life amidst the horror, I thought, as I read Susan Taubes’s desperate essays about Simone Weil and Martin Heidegger.

 

And I’m writing all these things. But I’m not sure what they’re for. I’m no sure what they’ll add up. A monograph. A scholarly monograph on Susan Taubes? An academic article? An academic essay? Or maybe an essay on Susan Taubes for some online journal. Some popular philosophy thing. I don’t know. Or maybe I should start a blog. A Substack, maybe. And just put the stuff I’ve written right up, without editing it very much. Maybe it’s not about wanting to write something academic. With all these footnotes.

I want to write like Susan Taubes did. I want to write Susan Taubes like Susan Taubes wrote. She published in journals. But those were different times. You could write in a more literary way, or something. Or in a more passionate way. I don’t know …

 

I love everyone now. Now I think the maniacs want to kill is all. I love humanity now. I’m not an misanthropist anymore.

I want something Good to happen, capital G. And maybe it will.

Maybe I’ll look back at this time and be glad of it. Be glad of what it prepared me for. Be glad that it made me look out for good things. To care about people.

 

You can see how she suffered. And that she wrote from her suffering. And eventually killed herself because of her suffering.

 

Is it ghoulish that I love her because she was beautiful and she was a suicide? She meant it … I respect that. She was sincere. Maybe that’s what I should do.

Yeah, but suicide’s too easy now. Euthanasia’s part of the whole depopulation thing. They’re offering it to angsty teenagers in Canada. To, like, anorexics in Australia. To the homeless. You’re supposed to euthanise yourself now.

So living on’s the new suicide. Great. You can’t be a martyr to thought anymore.

Is that what Susan Taubes is?

Maybe.

What about her children?

What about them? Why should she have thought of them? Because she’s the woman?

She as their mother.

 

They’ll offer euthanasia to all Philosophy students as a matter of course. To all humanities students, probably. It might get them off their debts. Euthanasia will be promoted as the only way to claim bankruptcy.

Sure – study, learn stuff about how shit the world is, then die. Might be worth it. Might give a certain urgency to your study.

 

So you won’t allow me my death fantasies. I actually like my death fantasies. It’s very consoling to know you have an out.

A cliched out. An it’s-all-been-done-before out.

How would you do it, anyway? Drowning? You could jump in the Tyne.

They’d just think I was a Susan Taubes copy-cat. Or a Susan Taubes tribute act.

Why are we always talking about suicide?

Because something’s really, really wrong with us. Actually, it sharpens things. Brings things into relief. It makes things mean things.

 

Oh Susan Taubes send us a sign.

She was so glamorous. Are you going to go glamorous?

She had all these affairs. I’m not very affair-y. That’s not my type. In another life, maybe …

 

Susan Taubes is, like, my spirit animal. What would Susan Taubes do?: that’s what I ask myself. Marry a madman Have a string of affairs. Write brilliant philosophy, and then write unreadable fiction instead.

 

The sea, the sea. Is it calling you to drown yourself?

No, actually. I’m not feeling very drown-y today. I’m no sure it’s that great a way to go, anyway. Look, there’s almost some sun. I think we should get some pickled mussels. And cockles. Not whelks – they’re too chewy. A crab sandwich, maybe.  And sit in the sun and eat our feast.

 

How would you go, anyway?

Let’s not talk about suicide for, like, five minutes.

You started it.

I probably did. But I’m actually feeling … cheerful. Is that allowed?

Oh how tedious.

Anyway, how’s your spiritual life? Have you found God yet? It’s apparently all the rage.

Our desperation is real. Our despair is real. Maybe. It’s what’s realest about us. It’s what’s best about us.

We have instincts. We know what to reject. We know what’s wrong – utterly wrong – about the world. We know what to despise. We despise it. We know what to hate. We hate it.

And we know what to love, too. We know in what direction we should turn. We know to what we should lift our heads. We know that it’s from there it will come. From on high. From the most high.

We know the clouds will part one day. We know the sun will come – the forbidden sun. The sun they want to dim. We know evil is not final. We know the world isn’t totally fallen. We know that sin is not absolute.

We know what we Want. With a desire that is greater than we are. We know what we Need. With a need that is greater than us.

The lies aren’t too great after all. The poison hasn’t worked after all. We not completely abandoned. Were not lost to abandonment.

Demons sweep through the world. They’ve tuned the madness spigots on. They’re flooding the world with madness. Deliberately.

We’re being deliberately deranged – of course. It’s being done for a reason As part of an agenda. This is deliberate social engineering.

The want us confused. Reeling. Perpetually knocked off balance. It’s just one thing after another. One kind of madness and then another. On purpose!

They want us mad, too. They want us deranged. So we don’t know where we are. So we don’t know what’s up and what’s down. They want us in flight, just as they’ve put the world in flight.

Blows from all sides. Attacks. Nihilism attacks. Senselessness attacks. Quite deliberate. They want to catch us off guard. Surprise us. Just when we think we were okay, another one comes – another attack. An attack from another direction. From every fucking vector.

 

The world is lies and poison. That’s all. Lies – poison. And what else?

Is this the final assault? Never. Always more. Until – until what? Until their new order is complete. But it will never be complete.

Always programming us. Always social engineering. Mass manipulation. Steering. They’re pushing us in certain directions. Super nudging. The behavioural psychologists are having a field day.

And we can’t fight back. Unless we separate ourselves. Set up our own enclave. Let the madness swirl about us. And step back. And keep our distance from it. Enjoy it, like some fireworks display. Get all meta about it.

Can we do that?

 

Is it a test, this timeline? Who’s testing us? And for what?

It’s made us desperate, this timeline. It’s made us cry out, this timeline. It’s made us beg, this timeline.

And yet we never sank to our knees. Never prayed. We were never capable of that. Why not? It was a … spiritual opportunity. Why could we never abandon ourselves? Trust another. Why could we never simply give ourselves up? Offer up ourselves, our lives. Everything we were.

Wasn’t that the time to do it? When we were on the brink of … whatever it was. Why not then? What held us back? Why were we so attached to ourselves? Why did we want to keep hold of ourselves? When we needed Help. Why couldn’t we admit it that?

Why couldn’t we turn ourselves over to someone else? To something else. We were on the brink of it, weren’t we? Why couldn’t we go further? Until all we were was Asking. Until all we could do was Kneel. Why couldn’t we admit that we were without resources? That there was no earthly help for us.

Why weren’t we strong enough? Why weren’t we weak enough? Our despair wasn’t complete, after all. Our despair wasn’t deep enough. We hadn’t despaired of the earthly, after all. We hadn’t give our earthly hopes, after all. The dread wasn’t driven deep enough in us. We weren’t actually crucified. The suffering hadn’t reached its truest pitch.

And it still hasn’t. There’s still further for us to fall.

 

A conversion. A turning. Why weren’t we capable of that? Why weren’t we able to lift our sufferings and present them to God? Why couldn’t wegive what we were to God? Why couldn’t we offer our suffering to the Most fucking High?

Couldn’t we feel his presence, very close? Wasn’t he there, at our edge. Just beyond us. Wasn’t he all around us? Why couldn’t we make the final move? Why couldn’t we edge closer?

Why could we cross that line? What stopped us? What in us, stopped us? What held us back? Did we lack, finally, the desire to pray?

Did we ever pray? Did our inner voices ever ring out? We were never able to reach pure ardency. Pure prayer. Pure questioning. Of everything. Of ourselves. Of even our power of questioning.

We could never offer ourselves up. Never sacrifice – ourselves. Our desperation was never deep enough. Never reached enough. Our river never reached the ocean. Never ran out into the expanse.

We never lay out under the sky, under the night. Never gave ourselves up. Never asked to be taken. We never reached the end of our strength, did we? Never found our way to the end.

We never lost ourselves. Always some little piece of ego, hanging onto itself. Believing in itself. Always a final atheism. A final egotism. Egoistic. We never came to our utmost edge. Never took the step. And will we ever?

 

Io’s conversion. Why does it mean so much to you?

It was something I could not do. I didn’t have that ability. Or non-ability. Or whatever it is. To put myself in the hands of … whatever … To entrust myself to … whatever. To lift myself towards it. To offer myself to it. My life. To put my life in God’s hands.

I never became just pure yearning. Just … the desire to be converted. I think that would be beautiful. I could never let go enough. Could never … give myself enough. Couldn’t yield that final bit of control.

Like … when you don’t want to know what it means anyone. When you’ve stopped trying to be intelligent.

 

We abase ourselves … apparently. We do ourselves down, in what we say. In our … piss-taking. That’s our schtick. But we’re still too attached to it: our capacity to debase ourselves Our inventiveness in doing ourselves down.

Virtuosos of despair: that’s what we’ve taken ourselves to be. Which means we’ve never reached it, our despair. Just when despair would claim us, we’ve saved ourselves by speaking of it. By ringing changes upon it. We’ve never felt despair – real despair. Only its approach. Which we ward away.

We’re too eloquent about our despair to really despair. Just as we’re too intelligent about our idiocy to be real idiots. Despair and stupidity … we’ll never know what they are. We’ll never reach true despair and true stupidity. We’ll always save ourselves from their depths.

Because we’re together. Because we talk about despair and stupidity all the time. Because … we laugh about them, and about everything. We save ourselves through talk. The miracle of being able to speak, and together. We share … whatever it is we share.

Ultimately, we have faith in friendship, not in God. Ultimately, we are intelligent together, even intelligent about our stupidity. Ultimately we are too articulate. We talk too much …

Unless … it’s talking that saves us. The capacity to speak. No: to be called, by the presence of others. Just as Abraham was called. And Moses was called.

By God … not by other idiots.

What if the caller was God. What if God calls through us. What all of us together called to each other like God. And we spoke, in response. And what we said … what we said saved us. Because it meant we’re not solipsists. Not atheists. Not atoms, all alone.

That we can speak. That we are called to speak. And that others around us are called in turn. That we addressed to others – to each other. Responded to each other. In a way that … surprised us. We said new things. We invented new things to say …

Despite our so-called gloom. Despite our alleged idiocy. Speech was our genius, after all. Speech was our happiness, all along. Speech banishes all despair. And isn’t that our brilliance? Isn’t it our light?

But it’s not our brilliance. It’s not our light. For isn’t God at play between us? Isn’t God calling us through each other? Isn’t speech our religion? Isn’t dialogue our church? Isn’t speech transcendence, and right away? Don’t we leave ourselves behind, and all at once?

This is our credo: we believe in speech. Our faith is here, right here, in the way we talk. The way we find speech. Even when things are terrible. Even when things are at their worst. Even when the world is full of demons.

Isn’t that the beauty? Everything’s in what we say. Our yearning. Our desire. Speech bears us. Lifts us. Lightens us. Offers us up to nothing. Our words – to no one. To oblivion. What we say, that none of us will remember. Hope. Hope in speech uttered and forgotten.

 

It’s hardly going to defeat evil, is it?

It doesn’t have to defeat it. Just suspend its reign, for a while. Just hold it back, for a while. A sun shaft. The clouds, parting.

Is that enough?

It has to be enough. The lightness of life. It doesn’t last. Nothing lasts. Anyway, I think of it as eternity, kind of. As opening unto another order of time. Or maybe it just stops time altogether, I don’t know. Somewhere, somehow, we’re always joking and laughing. And skylarking.

Somewhere the sun’s broken through the geo-engineered clouds. Somewhere, the strontium and barium and aluminium has stopped falling for a second. And the air we breathe is pure, for a moment. Somewhere – somewhen – there is no poison and there are no lies.

This is how we’re escaping the timeline, don’t you see?

Only for, like, a moment.

But a moment’s long enough.

 

We don’t tell lies when we speak, that’s the thing. We’re not perpetuating the lies. We’re not just passing them on. We’re not, like, poisoning each other.  The opposite: because we’re talking about the lies and about the poison. Which means we triumph over the lies and the poison.

Which triumph over division. Because we’re not divided when we speak. Which is why they hate us speaking. They’ll do anything to stop us.

 

They’re probably listening to us now. The algorithms are listening.

Yeah, but they won’t understand us. They don’t understand joy. They don’t get humour. They don’t see that we’re laughing at them. That all our piss-taking is directed at them.

They’d ban our pisstaking, if they could. No, they’d make us take offence at being taken the piss out of. They’d make us turn on each other. Claim that we’re endlessly triggering each other, or something. Because we weren’t being all positive and affirming …

But what they don’t understand that hate speech is love speech. That piss taking – detailed, careful pisstaking – is exaltation. Hate flips over into love, right?

All working class speech will be offensive in due course. All swearing will be banned …

Hit us with the latest scary tech stuff.

Well, we’ve broken Moore’s law now. It’s gone hypersonic.

 

They’re playing with light refraction now. Autonomous jets that can go invisible.

 

And it’s not about being information gatherers anymore. It’s about being information assimilators.

 

Technosorcery’s a real thing.

 

They’re redesigning and rewiring us through pharmaceuticals and frequency networks. But we all know that, right?

 

They’re repurposing all the functions of our bodies. They’re going after cellular and molecular behaviour.

And they’re turning genes on or off at specific places for particular purposes. They use frequencies. It’s pretty clever. Biology by design, basically. We’re basically becoming zombified.

 

And then there’s the latest fucking neurotech stuff.

What?

When they connect up technical stuff with nervous systems. Electrodes, computers, intelligent prostheses, all that stuff. It’s all about brain / computer interfaces. Translating neural signals into electrical inputs and vice versa.

 

They can print out a robot or a synth in one go. Like, a robotic human that could just walk out of the fucking printer and shake your hand.

 

They want to shrink the brain. Create a new race of morons. Very servile.

 

And you’ve heard of these artificial babies they’re growing? They’ve got tails, black eyes. They’re born with a full set of teeth. They’re walking at six months … They’re got really small brains, though. IQs about 60.

 

Total human / machine fusion by 2040. Total robotic autonomy by 2050.

It’s all about hollowing us out. Gutting us. Making us receptacles for … something weird.

Like what?

Dead spirits. Demons. Parallel dimensional entities in general.

Fuck.

 

Of course, all the tech comes from the spiritual realm. Fallen angels and the like.

There are spiritual entities the like of which we’ve never seen.

 

The haemorrhagic, the cyber and the spiritual all overlap now.

 

Tech’s going all witchcrafty, that’s the weird thing. They’re casting spells from space.

Fuck off.

Sure, there’s all this geomancy stuff. They’re doing it in Australia.

 

They’re trying to bring giants alive again.

Giants?

 

And cannibalism’s a thing. They want us to get used to eating people. Even craving it.

 

They’re opening all these portals. For old gods and goddesses. All sorts. Mythical creatures are going to appear. And the antichrist, eventually. There’s going to be a whole new antichrist religion.