Work in Progress

My literaro-philosophical escape capsule. She knew what I was hoping for, Livia said. She knew my secret plan.

It was my bust out plan. It was my tunnel of philosophy, my philosophico-literary opus.

I was going to write it all up – all my philosophical failures. I was going to make literature out of it – my philosophical non-career.

Which meant I was never really committed to philosophy – not ultimately. I was always merely watching myself so-called philosophise. I was always observing my failure to philosophise from a distance. And from a literary distance!

A cunning move! I was never really risking it all, philosophically. I was never as desperate as my peers in philosophy, my fellow idiots. Because I’d taken out literary insurance against philosophical failure. Because I had my literary side-hustle, which was also a literary sidestep. A secret way of justifying my philosophical life!

I thought I’d found a literary loophole. A literary get-out clause. Something to escape my failed UK European philosopher destiny. Because my philosophical defeat would no longer be a philosophical defeat if I wrote it up in the right way.

I was going to write the last will and testament of UK European philosophy, Livia says. UK European philosophy’s last gasp. UK European philosopher’s last fumblings in the dark. Its last attempts to pin the tail on the philosophical donkey …

Literature: that’s where my dreams of genius went. That’s where I stowed them, unlike the rest of us who only ever had philosophical dreams.

A genius of non-genius: that’s what I wanted to be. A literary writer who could make good on my non philosophical genius. Very cunning. A genius-move all by itself.

Of course, the potential flaw in the plan was obvious: wasn’t writing literature just as hard as writing philosophy, if not harder? Wasn’t it the case that the European literature-meisters I admired, that they were as much geniuses as the European philosophy-meisters I revered! If not more so!

Did I really think I was going to be a Blanchot 2.0? Livia asked. That I was going to be a new Hélène Cixous?

But I had an answer to that, too, Livia knew. I thought of myself as writing in a post-literary time. At a time after literature – when all the prestige of literature has disappeared. When you couldn’t do that high-falutin’ stuff anymore. You couldn’t write in a high literary register – not if you didn’t want to live in bad faith.

The ultimate excuse: these aren’t literary times, so I can’t be a literary genius – and that was my real genius. Shameless …

The most authentic literature was, to all intents and purposes, non-literary. It eschewed the high literary. The high modernist! The literature (non-literature) true to our times was a farcical literature. A literature after the literary fall, the cultural collapse. It belonged on this side of the high modernist mountains, my literature – my non-literature. And didn’t I even dream of combining my non-literature with non-philosophy? With a fallen philosophy, a philosophy of the ruins? Didn’t I want to take that non-philosophy as my subject – my very failure at philosophy. As if the only philosophy that was possible in our times was a farcical philosophy. A philosophy after the collapse, that played in its own ruins?

There is something real. And something true. And everything else is just lies.

Do you believe that? Does it matter?

Of course it matters.


Who made us? Who built us? God?

Not Mother, anyway.


What if the world Mother made is no different from the world God made? What if God is just another, bigger Mother?

God or Mother? Mother or God?

Are we children of God, philosopher? Or are we synths?

Opening the bottle.

O great wine spirit, show us the way, Driss says. O priests of the wine god in the holy night!

I just wish it was hemlock. I wish we could just have done with it all. Die like Socrates! He was positively delighted to be sentenced to death. He thought drinking hemlock was a cure …

A cure! There is no cure! They’ve poisoned the air. They’ve poisoned the earth. They’ve poisoned us – God knows. We’re sick with their poison. We’re sick with their sickness. As they want us to be.

They’ve left nothing alone. This wine just reveals the poison, that’s all. It lets us taste the poison as poison.

The only philosophy must be a philosophy of poison – that’s what Livia used to say. A philosophy that has grown from poison, and lets poison philosophise.  

interesting things grow from the poison, Livia said. Twisted things. Sports and mutants. With special gifts. The poison produced our kind – as a byproduct. As an unintended consequence.

They made their enemy, the poisoners, Livia said. The brought us into the world as near-perfectly poisoned. But they didn’t suspect that we might out-poison the poison. That one amongst us might be able to convert the poison.

Which is you, Shiva, Furio says.

More wine.

Disgusting, we agree. Still disgusting! If anything, more disgusting.

We’re supposed to be disgusted – that’s the point, we agree. Livia wanted our disgust. Disgust was to instruct us. It was to show us something. Make us taste something.

It makes me want to throw up.

But isn’t that the point? The wine makes want to vomit up everything. Everything we’ve learned. Everything we’ve known … All our philosophies … Which have never yet been philosophies of the disgusting. Which are not yet philosophies of the great poisoning.

And all the poison we’ve been made to take. All the evil stuff that we’ve swallowed down. All the noxious air that we’ve breathed. That’s made us what we are.

And we have to be disgusted with ourselves, too. We have to retch up ourselves. Expel ourselves. To be nothing other than this expulsion …

We must become an act of expulsion – nothing more. A casting out – of ourselves! Of everything we are! Everything we’ve been! What we’ve been made into!

What if Livia wanted us to keep it down? To … stomach it. To let it sink in. Pass through our digestive system. And to … convert it. That’s what Shiva did, right? That Halahala poison, or whatever.

All the destructive forces in the universe concentrated together. Shiva took it in. Drank it. He was going to sacrifice himself in order to save the universe. But then Sati gripped his neck to stop it reaching his stomach. So he held the poison in his neck …

Driss, bent over. Coughing out wine.

You failed the test, Driss!

It’s too late to hold our necks. The poison’s already reached our stomachs.

We’re metabolising it. The wine’s becoming part of us. Is that a good thing? A bad thing?

When the cry of our disgust reaches the ears of God … The cry of our … drunken disgustedness! Won’t that arouse God? Won’t it wake the angels? Won’t that be God’s cue to destroy the universe?

Livia never wanted it destroyed. Where the poison’s at its deepest, there, too is its saving power … Didn’t she used to repeat that? We haven’t fallen far enough, not yet – that’s the thing. There’s farther to go.

How can there be any farther to go?

Think about it: this is all we have of Livia now. Her wine. The wine she collected. That she put aside, after her departure. The thirteen bottles she meant us to find.

Thirteen!? What’s the significance of that? Sophia asks.

No idea, Driss says. But there’s got to be some significance. Livia was all about significance.

Or insignificance, Furio says. Or the mockery of any attempt to find significance …

We’re halfway through, nearly, Io says.

Discussion. She wanted to turn us into disgust seers. Disgust visionaries.

We’re being trained to taste the horror. Our drinking is supposed to cultivate disgust – a disgust that will take us to the end of all things. To a total sickness with the world …

And then what? Sophia asks.

I don’t know, I say.

Does wine taste any better underground? Does it make more sense underground?

No – it’s still punishment wine. It’s still gut rot wine. No better than some street alkie would drink.

Everything in my body, everything in my taste buds. Everything in my brain is saying, don’t drink this.

Nothing’s changed, then.

It’s a response of the most primitive parts of the brain. The hypo … thalamus. The amygdala … The whole limbic system. It’s phylogenetically ancient. The stuff that evolved long before the cerebral cortex.

So?

I’ve been doing research. Disgust slows the heartbeat – did you know that? Drops the blood pressure. Decreases the pulse!

So it’s good for you?

It’s because of the way we linger, fascinated, over the disgusting thing.

We’re hardly lingering over this wine. It’s chug-a-lug. Get it down as quickly as possible.

But we’re talking about it, aren’t we?

What else is there to talk about?

At least we’re disgusted – think about that. At least we feel disgust. At least we’re appalled. We’re not just numbed … Because that’s what everyone else is: numbed. Anaesthetised.

Anyone would find this wine disgusting!

But they wouldn’t keep drinking it, would they?

I think there’s such a thing as a vigilance of disgust. Of being shown something by it. Disgust is a state of emergency. Of the body. Of the soul. We’re disgusted, therefore …

Therefore, what?

It’s ontological. It’s ontological disgust. It’s absolute disgust. A revulsion at being itself.

Very grand.

It seems especially potent down here. Maybe it’s the depth that we’re at.

The paragraduates were supposed to make wine down here – that’s what I heard. Black wine – it’s part of their ritual. Buried in barrels in the deep, dark Newcastle soil. From the deep Newcastle terroir.

Newcastle black, they call it. A cousin on Newcastle brown. It has that same malty flavour. It has a caramel sweetness and chocolate thing. A bit nutty … With a hopsy flavour cutting through the sweetness … And they serve it in earthenware cups made from Newcastle boulder clay. It’s part of their ceremonies.

What ceremonies? What paragraduates?

It turns your eyes black. Which accounts for the black-in-black of the paragraduate’s eyes. It makes the paragraduates look like they’re not focused on you. That they’re looking into the far distance.

Fuck off with your paragraduates.

This wine shouldn’t be: that’s the thing, isn’t it? That’s what we’re supposed to feel. This wine is wrong.

It’s more than that. This wine shows what’s wrong with everything. It shows that everything shouldn’t be.

Shouldn’t: according to who?

According to anything right and true. Come on! What’s real is disgusting. What’s true is disgusting. The disgusting is the real. The disgusting is the true. It’s the thing in itself, and so on.

But it’s dangerous, the great disgust. Who can bear it? Who can really undergo it?

We’re supposed to, drinking this wine.

We need disgust – that’s what Livia thought. As a catalyser. As a necessary … condition. We need to reach the great disgust and overcome it.

And how do we do that?

Furio, quoting: Are poisoned wells necessary, and stinking fires, and dirtied dreams, and maggots in the bread of life?

A reversal: that’s how we should think of it. A revaluation … Of baseness. Of all the disgusting things there are.

So we need to love the wine: is that what you’re saying?

We need to love all the disgusting things. Including ourselves! Especially ourselves!
Fuck off.

We need to reach the depths of disgust. The bottom of the abyss. And then … affirm it. Love it. Say yes to it.

I thought that was Shiva’s job: to convert wine to poison. Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen in your throat?

The immanent conversion of the disgusting, X whispers. The immanent … transformation. The immanent transfiguration of all the foul things. That’s how you’d change the meaning of the world.

So we’re supposed to say yes everything? To the Organisational Management move? To the Organisational Management campus.

We have to be able to bear the thought of drinking this wine not just now, but over and again. We have to perpetually ruminate on this wine. As though we were endlessly regurgitating it …

Double disgusting! Impossible.

This wine is a gnosis – a knowledge. Of what’s real. Of what’s true.

But this world isn’t real. It isn’t true. There has to be something else – breaking in. Something from without.

Like what – God? The messiah?

The void … Didn’t Livia talk of that?

The void – what void?

Just some contentless … transcendence. That’s what we’re tasting. And sure, it tastes disgusting. But it’s something to break up the world … To show that it isn’t … complete. It’s about polarities again. It’s about knowing the world as a forcefield. It’s about maintaining a tension.

All we can do is live against it all. Which means live in our knowledge. Our idiot’s knowledge that everything’s wrong and that we can never be in the right …

The greatest danger is anaesthesia. Is no longer feeling disgust. Is losing the feel. Don’t we have to learn disgust anew?


We must remember our disgust. Think from it, not against it. It’s not about a cure. It’s about the poison.


The vigilance of disgust.

Absolute recoil: what other response could there be? Utter recoil. Grimacing! Involuntary gagging! Basic aversion! Primitive aversion! Originary keep-away!  Just … automatic!


The most primitive parts of the brain. The insula and basal ganglia regions of the brain. The hypothalamus! The amygdala! The whole limbic system. That’s what I’m tasting with. Those are the organs of disgust.

Phylogenetically ancient! Evolved long before the cerebral cortex!


Disgust slows the heartbeat – did you know that? Drops the blood pressure. Decreases the pulse! Because there’s always a pause in the recoil. A tendency to dwell, horrified, over the disgusting object …

You see, I was always so good. I was always a good person. And now what am I? Who am I to be? Do I even care who I am to be? Do I even ask that question, Who am I to be?

What does it mean to be good? What would it mean? What does God want for us, supposing that there is a God? Is it the same as what Mother would want?


Am I Mother’s synth, or a daughter of God? Am I some glorified robot, or the daughter of the God of Abraham and Moses?


Mother is a fake god, right? Mother is fake. I think I see that now. And does that make me fake? Is that what I am: a fake? A synth?


We should be thankful, philosopher. We shouldn’t despise the world. We shouldn’t hate it. We should want to live. We should actually want to live. In this world. Right here. Today and tomorrow.

Even you, philosopher. Even you should want to live. Even you should deign to live.


It’s going to be okay, philosopher. Everything’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay and I’m going to be okay and well live out our lives. And you’ll have a life and so will I.