There are parasites, feeding on us. Feeding on our negativity. Like, psychic parasites. Psychic bloodsuckers. Soul-grabbers. They’re living on us.
Where? I don’t see them.
They’re just out of sight. Just beyond our peripheral vision. They’re always vanishing into other dimensions. Or emerging from them. Only with certain .. drugs do they become really visible.
Which drugs?
Crystal meth, I think.
Where do they come from?
Some other plane. Some shadow realm. Some place of ruination.
Isn’t drunken theology fun? And stoned theology …
Stoners are always theologians.
Theologians should be stoned more often.
We need to smoke more, to further our theological investigations. Like Rastas – they have the right idea.
Jilly’s was our city of refuge, like you get in the Bible. Jilly’s was a pub of refuge. Jilly’s was the place of our feast of fools. Jilly, where we no longer have to spend time in our heads. Jilly’s, where we could always talk of the Gnostic fuckedness of it all. Jilly’s, where we could prove that we weren’t mirthless after all. That this wasn’t a world without joy, after all.
This is, like, the anti-gym. There’s such a thing as being too healthy.
Despair, rather than Intelligence. Horror, rather than logic.
Thought coming from the bottom. From the lowly. From the fools.
The curve of the world tends towards … what?
Bollocks. It tends towards bollocks.
Our joy in each other’s company: Cicero loved that. Our ease with one another, after so much isolation. Our laughter, after so much gloom. Our learning to be human again, after so much inhumanity. She could see it!
Didn’t Cicero always speak of the philosophy department as a lightning rod? As a capacitator. As a place where the antinomian flame was to be put to work.
What we had in common: a desire for the flash of transcendence in the immanent. For apocalyptic fire! For the burning up of the world! For instantaneous annihilation! For the divine fury! A desire for a messianism of destruction!
Our yearning. We were against the principle of the world, that was the thing. We knew we had to get out of it, as out of Egypt. That we needed an exodus.
Sure, Cicero knew the horror – intellectually. She knew what was coming – theoretically. But she didn’t feel it as we did.
Cicero might talk about shaking the world out of its contentment, its automatism. Of our leaving the closed, mechanistic system. But only we really lived against the world.
Cicero was all about the antinomian flame; about the otherness of revelation. But only we really felt it: the antinomian flame, the otherness of revelation.
What was Cicero’s role? Was she here to be the Harvester? The Coordinator? Who pulled it all together?
Wasn’t she there to understand our Significance? To teach it to us: the meaning our Significance? To explain to us what we could do. What we were for. What our role was.
Isn’t that why she gave us apocalyptic names? Just like Captain Beefheart renamed the Magic Band. We had to have new names too.
Cicero never wanted to intervene. She gave us an occasional word of guidance, that’s all. Something mysterious, whispered like Miles Davis was supposed to whisper to his sidemen. Some paradoxical instruction …
And didn’t Cicero sometimes direct us towards certain books? Ramanuja was a particular favourite. She bought us all copies of Ramanuja. Slipped them into our in trays. And Scholem’s Religious Nihilism, which she translated herself. We each had a copy of that, too. She presented it to us solemnly, without comment.
And then there was the framed paintings on the philosophy foyer walls. From her own collection. That she paid for herself. Why Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights? Why Bacon, Portrait of Isabelle Hawthorne?
And her library. She was a selector of books. A book curator. A book DJ. Almost random. Why Prigogine? Who’s Esterlin? Why those lurid books about bloodlines? Some still sealed in plastic. Was she being sent them by publishers?
Cicero’s things. The infinite intrigue of Cicero’s things. On Cicero’s shelves. Why that inverted globe? Why those miraculous medals? Why an EMF meter? What did she want to measure?
Cicero’s world. Where did she come from? What was her life like before? Why did she turn to us – to our kind? How did she Know? What prepared her? Didn’t she want to achieve anything in her own name?
A few articles here and there – all of them occasional. Intervening in this or that debate. Half forgotten. Hopelessly obscure. You never understood the context. What they were supposed to be saying? Where was her philosophy? What belonged to her? Hard to answer. Hard to work out.
Despair – that you can’t fake. That can’t be bought. Despair as an attunement – to what? To what is worth despairing about. To what is despair-worthy. Which is to say, everything. Which is to say, the total state of the world. Which is to say, the state of world collapse. Global spiritual ruination. And actual ruination.
A despair bias is absolutely necessary to correct the general positivity bias, Cicero said. And a horror bias is necessary to correct the general glee bias.
What has to be thought can only be done so through despair and horror, Cicero said. Despair and horror reveal what is to be thought, what is most worthy of thought.
Only the dead are strong enough, Cicero said. Only those who expect nothing. The already destroyed. The already ruined. For whom the apocalypse is a given. For whom every day is the Last Day.
The fools aren’t fooled, Cicero said. The stupid aren’t stupid.
Our blood ran fast, despite everything. We were never depressed, Cicero noticed that. Never down, for all our talk of the end times. The apocalypse.
Our idiot energies, in spite of everything. Our animal spirits. Our perpetual good cheer.
Weren’t we, as Cicero said, the best company? Wasn’t she at her happiest borne along by our high spirits? Didn’t she throw over her old friends to hang with us? Didn’t she tell us that she didn’t know the meaning of fun until she met us?
Our unserious seriousness. Our cheerful despair. Our fun-filled sense that there was nothing to be done.
She liked to watch us drink, Cicero. She liked to watch us down pint after pint. She like to find us in the zone – the drunken zone. On the drunken plateau. And maintaining it, our drunkenness, for hour after hour. How she admired it! Our pacing. Our deliberation. Our steadiness. The fact we were out for the long haul.
Sometimes Cicero saw the desperation in us. Sometimes she saw our horror, surfacing. Sometimes she saw the despair. Sometimes she saw our deaths – the deaths we carried with us.
Cicero marvelled. She admired us. You have souls, she said. You have … complications. Depths. There was a contortion that was ours. A unique contortion in every case. Each of us, uniquely twisted. Each of us, crabbed in our own particular way.
That’s why she put us before prospective students at our Open Days. They’ll sense it in you, she said. The authenticity. The grit. You are people who’ve suffered. You’ve walked the line. You fascinate. You have some outsider charisma. You’re raw. You’re edgy. You’ve been places. Psychologically, I mean.
Divine violence needs a mediator, Cicero insisted. It needed to be transformed from violence into love. Into love? we asked, amazed. Into love! Cicero said. The lightning had to be directed towards the ground of the creaturely condition. Which is to say, towards love.
Love!? But what did Cicero mean by love? Something on fire? Passion, raging? The love of the neighbour, Cicero said. That was how the world was to be redeemed. Redeemed! we exclaimed. We didn’t want it redeemed. Only burnt up. Only destroyed …
The world was the old order, and we wanted the new one! we said. The new world, that would be revealed after the flames! Cicero was impressed by our faith, but she did not agree. This world needs mending and fixing and repairing, Cicero said, not destroying. It needs to be lifted from the lower realms, not plunged more deeply into them.
Work in Progress 