Work in Progress

Didn’t Cicero insist that the divine fire – lightning – reveals itself as love. As the love of the neighbour?

Cicero didn’t seem very loving to me.

Hate is a mode of love, she always insisted. Hate evil, love good, right?

How does she get from like lightning to love? It’s confusing.

 

There’s a … messianic energy that is at work … a way of bringing the lightning to the ground and putting it to work. That's what she used to say. Letting it become effective. 

As what?

As love.

 

It’s not about destroying the world, destroying reality, but shaking it out of its contentment, its automatism: that’s what Cicero used to say. Out of its closed, mechanistic system.

 

You have to use apocalyptic energy – that’s what Cicero thought. It wasn’t about the preservation of the created world, nor its destruction, but the redemption of the world – the transformation of creaturely reality.

We have to shape and transform reality. Can we do that? Aren’t we too impatient?

To use the negative energy of desire, of despair. To use it to transform the world. A kind of work – to transform the creaturely realm. Our realm. Is that what we are? Are we creatures?, we asked her, like idiots.

 

The mission – to liberate everything from the bondage of the world. From what we’re tied to. From the natural order.

 

Divine energy. Revelatory energy. The flash of revelation. The madness of anarchy and amorphy. The destruction of all forms.

 

Divine violence needs a mediator. And that’s what the philosophy dept was to be. Where the flame of love was to be mediated, shared out. Where it transformed from violence to love.

That was the mission of Cicero.

 

A messianism that would belong to us – not an imitation of God, not a destruction, but part of the process of redemption.

Not creation, not destruction, but modest work – the mending, fixing and repeating of the world, lifting it from the lower realms.

We work against the university, of course we do. We work against the purple – the imperial purple, the apocalyptic purple, whatever. We’re struggling against it. We need the struggle. It sharpens us. It focuses our minds. And the students’ minds, too.

The fact of the purple. The depth of the purple. Gives them something to work against. They have to go through hell to reach their paradise. So we have to show them they’re in hell. A purple hell, in this case.

 

What are the psychological effects of purple? Isn’t it deliberately depressing? Debilitating? Isn’t it supposed to keep us down. To keep us here on Earth?

Purple! Deep purple! When did they decide on it? How did they decide on it? Who did they consult? Was it just random? Was it just pick some random colour scheme?

Purple!? what’s their plan? Do they even have a plan? Isn’t it that part of the torture: wondering whether or not they have a plan?

Their plans? … what plans? … What if it’s just random moves, just whims, fancies … Arbitrary decisions, made on the spur of the movement.

Who knows, they might even mean well. Purple might be a gift to us – their idea of a gift.

 

And the views! What a panorama! Twenty feet of window in my office. There’s St Thomas’s. There’s the War Memorial. There’s the library. There’s a row of shops. There’s the green around St Thomas’s. There’s the whole sky, the magnificent sky, so vast.

The sky, and birds flying across. And clouds moving across. And sometimes blue. And sometimes the sun. And sometimes, a bright day. The sky! Elevation! A view! Isn’t that something: to have a view. To command a prospect.

Is that part of their plan? Part of their non-plan? It feels like pure beneficence. Pure luck. What bad intention could they have in giving us a view? In letting us see out of our prison?

The sky! The whole sky! What a gift to us! What plenty! We’re practically in the sky. We’re practically airborne. Flying through the sky, like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz. Flying to where, in our purple house? God knows!

 

The purple’s thinking. It’s having purple thoughts. And perhaps we are, too. Is it contagious, do you think?

Our students are the future … our hope … we’ll send them out into the world like shock troops. To spread the message. The doctrine.

They sense it in us. Our ardency, which has to become their ardency. Our fervour, which will become their fervour.

Our role: to transmit the lightning. It let it strike through us and reach them. We have to make them receptive. We have to open them to radical evil, and beyond that to radical good.

We’re shaping the future. Were forming true apocalypticists. Who can see through the fake apocalypses. Who don’t live in fear. Who won’t be overwhelmed in what is to come.

Adventure – I wanted an adventure. A philosophical adventure, it turns out. And I wanted some fun. Some sparring. Some to and fro. There’s no more to and fro between my husband and I. I wanted to be aroused. Isn’t that the thing?

 

Wouldn’t you rather that I was far, far away and that you could write to me? Or write about me, your love for me, if it is love.

Distance – that’s what you’d like. Then I could become a fantasy figure upon whom you could project whatever you like. I’m too close to you. I’m too real. I’m too here. That’s not what you want, is it?

 

The sky’s sealed against us. We can’t get through. We can’t get to the other side. What’s it like on the other side? Blue, I imagine. I’d like to see the blue. This has been the coldest, greyest Spring, hasn’t it?

 

What does it all mean, philosopher? What does anything mean?

Our lectures.

We have terrible things to impart. To warn them of. Evil things. Forces.

 

Our lectures.

Passing on our delirious death fantasies to the students. Our general life-denial.

 

Our lectures.

Our horror. All-encompassing. Our sense of absolute doom. Our sense that the sky, at any moment, could be full of flames. Hasn’t the sky always been on fire for us? Hasn’t world destruction always been in the offing? Hasn’t it always been the day before the Day of Judgement?

 

Our lectures.

And all of it with a chiliastic edge. With an apocalyptic edge.

 

Our lectures.

Our resentments. Our fantasies. Our eyes on the burning horizon.

 

Our lectures.

Our madness. The peculiars we turned out to be. Our madness, spoken. Resounding.

Your suicidal fantasies. Why do we have to be part of them? Why does it all have to be public? Why do you have to talk about them so much? Why do you go on and on …

Because I’m tired of life. And I’m tired of being tired. Don’t you think we’ve lived too long, all of us? Don’t you think we should find the perfect moment to … you know … And what if that moment’s now … or now …

 

Do you think suicide is truth, or something?

I think suicide is error. I think suicide’s a great going wrong. But I like error. And I want to go wrong. And no one will understand why, not really. And maybe I won’t understand why. It’s … it’s a turn into unreason. Into not thinking things through. It’s a desire for like, unknowledge. Non-fucking-knowing.

 

Are you going to do it tonight – of all nights? Is this going to be it? How dramatic! Tomorrow, you’ll be but a memory for us. Imagine that. You’ll exist in the past. We’ll talk about you in the past tense. What sort of funeral do you want? How should we remember you?

 

How would you do it, anyway? Actually, I don’t even want to know. I’m sure I’ve asked that before. I don’t want to feed the fucking frenzy.

Are we anarcho-communists or anarcho-capitalists?

Does it matter? The point is that we’re anarcho-somethings.

Anarcho-wankers. Anarcho-tossers.

To maintain the void in the world. To hold onto it – live it – inhabit it.

 

A purifying voiding of self. It’s what ascetics understand. An extinction. A death in life.

 

The evacuation of the world. A kind of deliverance. A being-claimed.

 

We want to be filled with the light of the void.

We never learn from our disappointments. We never course-correct. We never do things better.

 

What will our lives add up to? What’s their greater significance? What are we for? What do we do? Who’s going to remember us? What will we amount to? Where are we going? What’s this all for? Who will love us? Remember us? Mourn us?

We’re tolerated. We’re allowed to teach. Which means no one expects anything dangerous from us.

 

We’re allowed to teach this, because it does not matter. We’re permitted this, because it is of no consequence. They’re letting us get away with it because we’re not getting away with anything.

 

The fact that we haven’t been censored means something. We must be part of their plan. They must want us to teach the young. Think about that. We’re part of it. We’re controlled opposition. Barely even opposition.

 

There must be a reason why we’re allowed to teach this stuff. Why it’s allowed to be taught. It’s quite deliberate. It’s why we were brought here. Why we were given these jobs.

In truth, they must have groomed us. Just as they’re making us groom our students. We were formed, just as we’re doing the forming.