Work in Progress

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.

We saw through it all – the ordinary world, Cicero knew that. We weren’t just good little nihilists. We didn’t live in their world, the good little nihilists.

This was an island in a great chaotic sea, that’s all: that’s what we knew. This island Earth. This island world. And beyond, the great Futility. The night. Which laughs at what we do. Laughs because it doesn’t laugh. Mocks us because it doesn’t mock us. Roars in its silence …

 

We saw through the world, Cicero knew that. Meetings. Offices. The usual politenesses. Our smiles were always the smiles of the outside. Our laughter came from all the way from the Outside. And when we drank, it was only to regain our relation to the Outside. Only to channel the forces of the Outside. It was put them to work – to the opposite of work.

That was our anarchy. The anarchy in all things, which was our anarchy, too. Which was the anarchy in our hearts. Releasing us from Pomposity. From High Seriousness. From all the usual alibis and excuses.

We’d died to the world, the false world. We’d seen through the fakery. We lived outside this world, within it. We lived in the larger world – the larger non-world. We lived in recurrence. In the indeterminable. In the beginningless and endless.

They’ll never know what you know, Cicero said of her academic colleagues. They’re not close to it, like you are. The secret of life is known only by those who’ve seen to the world. Who’ve died to it and come back. Who went beyond it, but had to come back.

There are those who know the world as a game, Cicero says. Who laugh at it: the whole world as a game. Who’ve learnt the lesson: that it’s all a game, a great game. That the Madness is greater than we are. That things just Happen, and we can’t do much about it. That the Contingency is greater than anything we might impose. That it towers over us: our powerlessness. The fact that we can do very little. That we’re dwarfed. Towered over …

And yet, we also know that the contingent has no ultimate reason for being the way it is. There’s no ultimate reason for anything. So you can’t complain, can’t mourn. It’s not all about the ur-trauma. About the withdrawal of the ground. About the absence of Necessity. About the great Indifference … the great Nullity … the great Void … threatening to devour everything.

Life is lived in midst of this. Forgetting the great Powers. The terrifying Sublimities. Forgetting all about the Storm of it all.

That we could laugh forever at the killing joke. At the arbitrariness of our fate. At the fact that what happens is in nobody’s hands. Even the rulers of this world. The great Planlessness. The great Randomness. The great Meaninglessness.

Man thinks and God laughs. We laugh – and laugh at ourselves thinking. Wasn’t that it, our philosophy. Our laughing philosophy?