Work in Progress

The certainty of the fucking end. The most beautiful thought … The most irresistible thought … The most seductive thought. It’s coming. The end is fucking nigh.

 

Just imagine the world were ending tonight. That this was the last night. So beautiful.

The great no-more. The great finish line. The great guillotine blade, flashing down. The beauty of starlight on the blade. Chopping down. Cutting down.

And your head severed from your neck, flying out.

 

Cruelty – that’s what we want. A cruel, but quick death. Not torture – we’ve had enough of torture. Every day is fucking torture. Time is torture.

The point is an end of time. The point is the cut off. The cutting off the head of time. The point is the end. The point is the severing.

A cauterized wound. A burnt-clean wound.

Just a blow – the swordstroke – and the smooth wound.

 

So cut our throats. Strike us dead – all at once. Death at one blow. Death, sudden. Death, lightning-striking. We don’t want to wait any longer. Waiting itself is torture.

Let it end – tonight. Let the world end – tonight.

 

Every drinking night is a desire-for-the-world’s-end night. To drink is to desire the end. To drink for the end. To toast the end. To laugh at the prospect of the end.

We’re coming to it, the end. We’re rushing forward to meet it, the end. Just as it’s rushing to meet us. Our hour, the end. What will save us: the end. The axe blade falling. The flashing light, reflected on the blade.

 

Death comes, like God. Or is it God coming, like death?

Death’s approach, God’s approach: pure mercy. Finitude. The deliverance of the limit. The fact that it doesn’t have to go on forever. That the death sentence will be carried out. That the judgement will be served.

 

Round me off. Round off my life. Bring it to an end, a perfect end. Let there be no more. Relief. Release. A gasping upward. A cry of relief, upwards. That there will be no more. That time will be at an end – for me. That an apocalypse will come – for me.

 

And what will be revealed? A world, without me. The world, minus me. The perfection of the world, without me. The wound healed. Negation negated. A perfect plenitude. The world healed – of me. And me healed – of the world. Suits us both …

 

Like being forgiven. Like being pardoned of sins.

The world will be healed of you – of your memory. You needn’t trouble the world any longer. You needn’t be like a bad dream of the world. Like a nightmare of the world.

 

We didn’t fuck up the entire world.

 

We will be forgiven. You will pass out of this life.

 

The evil purged. Catharsis – of the world. The world’s happy. The world’s relieved.

 

Our kind will pass out of existence. We won’t last. We can’t last. We’ll be bred out.

 

We’re extraneous. Superfluous. Our kind aren’t needed. The world’s had had enough of our kind. And rightly so.

We’ve had enough of us. We’ve been here too long – we know that.

 

Now for our last words. Our words have always been last words. We’ve said too many last words. Our entire oeuvre: last words. Everything we’ve ever said: last words.

Our last silence. The relief of not having many words to say. Of not having to let more words loose. Of not having to fill up the world with more words. Not saying stuff. Of having no more to say.

 

An end, the end. It’s a beautiful thought. God, saying: enough.

Kneeling down and thanking God. Kneeling and saying, thanks for death. Saying, thanks for the beauty of death. The absoluteness of death. The cleanness of death.

 

We’ve outlived our time. We’d always outlived it. We were born wrong. What remains is to correct the error.

 

The great Simplicity. The great Ordering.

It’s here; it’s come. It’s welcome. We’ve wanted nothing else.

The correction – celestial. The end – heaven come to earth.

 

God, the executioner. God, the ender of pain. God the suffering-ender. God, the silencer of screams. God, the annihilator. Who twists the neck in mercy. Who crushes the skull in mercy.

God, the merciful. Who does what is needed.

 

The divine DIGNITAS. The godly strangler. The celestial executioner. Who drowns the kittens …

That beautiful moment when you realise you haven’t got long left.

A terminal case, in the last moments. In the final agony … A roaring in the ears. A roaring, as of vast applause. You’ve done it. You’re going to die. The end has come, and it’s beautiful.

Death, coming. And savouring its coming. Savouring the last moments. The last glory. Savouring the time from now to the end, to the utter end.

 

Your blood, running out. Your blood, draining from your system. What could be more beautiful?

 

Death, death. No more of this wicked world. No more devils and archons. No more powers and principalities. No more Satan-on-earth. No more screams, no more cries. No more day-and-night torment.

Only drunken time matters. Only insobriety matters.

The time between drinking is wasted time.

 

We’re not drunk enough. We’re not angry enough. We’re not appalled enough. We not screaming enough. We’re not hateful enough. Our blood isn’t frothing enough.

 

We spend a lot of my time, utterly pissed. We go from pub to pub, utterly pissed. We stagger around the pubs, utterly pissed. We buy drink after drink, utterly pissed.

We order at bars, utterly pissed. We sit out in beer gardens, utterly pissed …

 

We’re too low. Not scattered across the lowlands.

We need alcohol to lift us up. To bind us together. To bring us together. We have to find the ardency. The hatred. The high seriousness.

 

We need to reach a promontory of drinking. To be able to look out – see what’s happening. Take in the whole fucking panorama. From sea to shining sea or whatever.

 

We become visionaries when we drink. We SEE when we drink. We need to be out of the lowlands. Out of the valleys.

 

This is why we have to drink. To climb up. To attain it – a viewpoint. To be able to SEE. With the right intensity. With the intensity of focus. With the right narrowness of focus.

 

This is a last redoubt. This is a last stand – here, in the pub. They’re coming for us. They’re make their way. Sure, they haven’t quite reached us yet …

 

Our drinking superpowers.

 

We’re reaffirming … the power of assembly. Drunken assembly.

If this were a film, it’d be a mood piece, low on plot.

It could be a surf movie. Look at those guys over there.

Do you surf?

No.

Do you?

No. I’m happy not surfing.

So let’s spice it up. Suppose … suppose there was a coast monster.

You want it to be a monster movie?

Sure!

Tell me about your monster.

He wants to die, and can’t. He’s very old, very ancient. He’s seen the rise of humanity, from beginning to end. And he’s sick of it … You can hear him shouting at night sometimes.

Is that what he does: shout?

Sure – from pain. Like dull pain. One day … one day he’ll just devour us all.

What’s stopping him now?

Hope. Stupid hope.

Something has gone very wrong.

With us?

Cosmically, I think. On the other side of the universe. Some death-ray has finally reached us. Some despair ray. Some forcefield of utter horror.

Why us?

Oh, it’s everyone. They’re just in denial.

A cosmic catastrophe. A new kind of radiation, or something, that reveals itself in despair stroke horror.

So we’re astronomers.

Of sorts.

We’re cosmologists.

Of a weird kind.

We’re astronomers.

In a certain sense.

Amazing.

We’re in tune. We’re musicologists. We’re hearing the disharmony of the fucking spheres.

To think, we are to prepare our undergraduates for the world, for that world. To think, we have to equip them to survive out there …

Do they know how doomed they are? Could they bear to know? And after what’s already been done to them? My God …

We should read them their last rites. Say the prayers of the dead over them.

 

Posters of student work on the purple noticeboard. Posters on their work. From the Apocalypse Now and Then module. From the Contemporary Omnicide module. From the Neural Weaponry module.

Covering the purple noticeboard with their work. With their individual takes on the horror. On so many horrors!

 

Do you ever sense, like, an immense evil? we ask them. Do you ever sense an immense goodness? Are these the end times, like it says in the Bible?

We’re ready to die. We have no attachment to life. We’re tired of life. We’re ready to say, Let it be your will.

If we felt, really feel, our mediocrity, what then? Might something really happen then? If we experienced, really experienced our despair at our idiocy, might we not be idiots anymore?

 

Is our idiocy a wanting to change? Is our despair a prayer? Do we merely wallow in our stupidity, dwell in it, rather than actually want to be transformed?

 

To experience our stupidity genuinely, sincerely. To actually want to be transformed.

To have a thought, a single thought. The simplest thought. Even if it’s only the purest thought of our stupidity.

 

A prayer to be what we are not.

 

This is our chance, away from Cicero. Now that Cicero’s gone.

Our chance for what?

To find out who we are. To find out what we can do. To find out what we want.

We’re Cicero’s people. Cicero has faith in us, even if no one else does. Cicero will lead us out of our maze: that’s what we thought. Cicero will lead us from ourselves, from the trial of our mediocrity. From the passion of our idiocy.

 

Cicero, who always knew our idiocy as awareness, as desire. Who knew our mediocrity as a yearning to be what we are not.

The world’s just some … monstrosity.

But we’re monstrous, too. That’s the thing. There’s something wrong with us, just as there’s something wrong with the world. We’re warped as the world’s warped. We’re twisted as the world’s twisted.

 

Are we God’s idiots? The devil’s?

 

Another night. At the pub again.

Must we ratchet it up again? The whole dog and pony act?

No, this isn’t good for us. It isn’t good for the universe.

 

We see everything apocalyptically. We have an apocalyptic bias. An eschatological bias. A Gnostic bias, probably.

 

The air hates being the air. The air’s just wandering lost in air. The air, dazed in air. Just like water’s flowing lost in water. Just like the Earth just plunges into Earth.

They’re all waiting for redemption. They’re waiting for their proper names.

 

The aching of all things in their self-hatred. In their loathing for themselves. In their atheism.

The atheism of air, of water, of the earth. Our own atheism, which is the heart of our self-hatred.

 

We hate our own nihilism, as the universe hates its own nihilism.

 

Lost in the coils of our evil. Lost in the coiling, the writhing. Lost in the agitation of our sin. Lost in the deepening of the Fall.

 

How deep does the boredom go? How deep does it run? The world-disgust? The world-horror?

Deeper than us. It’s the disgust of this world for itself. It’s the horror of the world for what it is. It’s like auto-immunity disease. It’s auto-horror. Self-rejection.

Too much consciousness. Too much awareness. Too much time to think – is that it? Too much life. We’re too awake.

We’re alert, but what for? We’re open-eyed, but what for? What is it that requires our vigilance?

 

We’re alive, but why? For what purpose? How do we use life? What do we do with it: life?

This can’t be called life, can it?

Life, in search of life. Life, missing life. We’re looking for life. That’s what life’s for. We’re searchers.

 

Is that what we should be doing with our time? Is that what our time’s for?

It’s, like, time-abuse. The abuse of our lives. Of our life-force.

What is it that really matters? That matters most? Isn’t that the question?

Instead, it’s just doom spirals. Self-hatred spirals. All our energies turned against ourselves.

 

We need to be reduced. Expunged. Punished. We have to loathe ourselves into oblivion. Undergo our own, private apocalypses.