Work in Progress

We’d be wiped out soon, that’s what we believed. We’d be put out of our misery soon. Some apocalypse or another would do for us.

It couldn’t be allowed to go on, our being in the academy, could it? A kind of equilibrium would find itself again, the error would be corrected. The typo erased.

We’d disappear – or perhaps the whole academy disappear. We’d vanish, just like that. Just disappear. And things would be righted. Would go back to normal. Order would be restored.

Our time would pass. The whole anomaly. It’d be history – and forgotten very quickly. Just – buried, as it should be. No one should remember!

A phase, nothing more. An experiment gone wrong. A mistake, capital M. But one quickly righted. One quickly memory-holed. An accident. Well intentioned, perhaps. With laudable aim, no doubt. But best forgotten. Best passed over. Best buried in the memory.


They’d talk of the philosophy episode. And shake their heads. They’d speak of Livia’s folly, and look rueful. How could we let it happen? They’d ask themselves. How could it have occurred, on their watch? Wasn’t it their fault, too: the philosophy episode? Livia’s folly?


Yes, they had a part in it, the philosophy disaster, it had to be admitted. Their heads should hang in shame, and so on. An oversight! A lapse of judgement: yes of course.

Only no one will ever care about the philosophy disaster. No one will give a monkeys about Livia’s folly. The university will have other things on its mind.


And there’d be no one remember the whole sorry episode. No one would want our idiots’ testimonies. Of course not! We’d have been shuffled off elsewhere. Shrugged off. Dispatched, as soon as Livia retired. And that would be that. It would just be another university trauma, to be forgotten.

We’ll flee to Mother when the world ends. Mother will make a space for us to keep us safe. How about that?


Mother will save us. Mother will make a world just for us. You and I and our philosophical child.

The philosophy child?

Our baby makes three, philosopher.


Mother could just make a world for us. And we could live there forever. Just talking our philosophical talk. Shooting the philosophical breeze.


Does Mother approve?

Who knows what Mother likes? Maybe we relieve her boredom.

Is Mother bored?

Imagine all the Organisational Management conversations she has to hear. She must be bored.


Mother’s running an app. A philosophy and organisational manager app. Making us talk like this forever.

I don’t want to be an app. I want to be real.

What’s so great about being real?


Maybe we’re not real. Maybe Mother’s just running a stimulation. Maybe the whole universe is a simulation – I don’t know.


I’m glad I’m disgusted. I’m glad I can still be disgusted. Because that’s the only way of hanging onto what’s real.

And what is real, philosopher?

Not this. Not this.


We have to be disgusted. And hang onto it. Like, an uncanny valley thing. We should be spooked out.

It’s not going to be uncanny valley for long.


Can Mother make a real beach?

She’s trying. You’ll be able to feel the sand beneath your toes when she’s done. Mother 2.0 or 3.0 will  be able to make whole virtual world.


Do you believe in reality? What do you believe in?

I believe there’s something real. And it sickens me. And it appals me.

But you’d prefer the sickening real to the really quite delightful unreal?


I think you’re depressed. This is how depressed people talk.

And you’re dissociated.


What’s so great about disgust? I’ve been wondering that.

If we’re not sickened by everything, then are we not authentic? If we’re not appalled and disgusted and horrified, then don’t we feel it? Are we just fakes? Are we glorified synths?


In the beginning, there’s disgust. Our disgust. Our being appalled.

What about romance – is romance real? Is it a lie? Isn’t it just nature’s programming, philosopher? Nature’s honey trap, or whatever. To ensure human breeding …

You have to be disgusted at that, too.


Whatever world you’re in, you’d still be disgusted. Whether it’s real or artificial.


There’s an instinct that we have. There’s a knowledge that we have. A gnosis.

Of something better?

Only that this world is wrong. Only that it’s all disgusting.


And what I hate about this wine is that it pretends that it’s not all disgusting.


I don’t want to play let’s pretend. I’m tired of let’s pretend. There’s something real.

What’s real, according to philosophers?

What there is. Base reality. The appalling. The horrifying.


Doesn’t it get tiring – all this being horrified? I don’t know how you bear it.

I don’t bear it.


We’re in this world for one reason: to know that it’s fake. It’s not, like, intellectual knowledge. It’s something you have to feel. To taste.


If everything is fake and real and sucks, then what’s so particularly wrong with Mother and her Mother verse? Nothing, is the answer.

We’re further away from what’s real. At another remove.

Near or far, it’s all the same to Gnostics, so far as I can tell.

Don’t you know what you’re building, in Organisational Management? Don’t you what it will do to you? That you’re working against your own interests? Don’t you see what you’re destroying? Where you’ll end up?

The revolution turns on itself. It eats its own young. You’ll lose your fancy houses. Your holidays in the sun. They’ll have you cooped up in one of their lifepods – at best. This isn’t going to turn out well for you.


You know the plan: they won’t need us, most of us. And if you aren’t part of the new elite … there won’t be a middle class, right?

The rulers and the ruled, that’s all. And they won’t want the ruled. They won’t want the costs of maintaining the infrastructure, or whatever. Paying universal basic income. They’ll bring in a slave population. Not used to freedom. And do away with the rest of us.


It’s all exponential now. It’s following the great … parabola. It’s accelerating. All the way to … wherever. And this campus is where it’s going to happen.

Death to it all. Is that what you want? Death to everything. Does the thought of that thrill you?

The great Destruction, philosopher. Will that seem like Truth to you. Capital T?


The End. Is that what you want to happen, philosopher? With all of your heart? With everything you are?

Do you want it to End, finally? Do your eyes fill with tears of joy to think about it?


The apocalypse. The Ending. The great door closing. The lights turned off, for the entire universe. Wouldn’t that be something?


They’ll close its eyes, the universe. Whisper, Enough, and kiss it on the lips.

And abandon it to death. And how beautiful it’ll be, in its death. How coldly beautiful. How perfect. The corpse of it all, the truth of it all, just lying there, on God’s slab.


I’ll bet the best thing for you would be a love death. That’s it, isn’t it: would you like us both to die together? To hurl ourselves down from somewhere to other.

We’d both lie in the foyer of the tower, two cold corpses.


You’re not going to save anyone. Philosophers aren’t going to save the world from Organisational Managers. You’re too full of crazy, perverted thoughts. You’re too fascinated by death.


Why are you so fucked in the head? Philosophy makes a virtue of it, clearly: being fucked in the head. You’re supposed to cultivate it, in philosophy: being fucked in the head. That’s all philosophy is … a license to be fucked in the head. To be totally, like, aberrant.


You’re good for nothing, right? Good for no purpose. Good for nothing except death. Except accelerating towards death. Because you think that death is the truth of it all. That death is the end and the beginning.


You’re a Case philosopher. You’re a Problem. You need to be Explained.


You take things very far, philosopher. You take ideas … notions … and run with them. Run so far with them that … you’ve turned into whatever it is you are.


You’re hardly human anymore, are you? It sends a chill into me. I feel … frightened, even.

Frightened by what?

By you.


To have strange thoughts. To cultivate strange thoughts. And let them take you to … wherever. Weirdoville.


You want me to be cruel to you. You want me to say terrible things, philosopher. I can tell. You want me to be evil.


You want destruction. You want the end. You want hatred. And perhaps you should be destroyed and hatred. And this whole world with it. You want it destroyed just as you want to be destroyed.


Only the apocalypse will satisfy you. That’s all you want. Only the End. Which is very fucked up.


It would be easier for everything to end, wouldn’t it? For it all to be burned up? The apocalypse, happening once and for all. The end, and then rolling credits.

But it doesn’t end, does it? It goes on, doesn’t it? Today, then another day and a day after that.

Our whole lives have been leading up to this.

What, going underground?

Something important is waiting for us here. Everything’s leading us down.

Delusion – always delusion.


It’s a shithole. Just a hole for tramps, who want some place to smoke crack out of the wind. And miscreant postgraduates. Who want to play dens, or something.


Have you brought the wine? Good – we’ll need supplies. It’s part of the descent. We have to maintain a certain level of blood alcohol.


Livia would have wanted this.

Our descent? Because it deepens the farce?

Exactly.

Because we have unrealistic expectations? Because we’re one a wild goose chase, with no grounding in reality?

Definitely.

Because we still have the idea that reality actually corresponds to our … imaginings?

Yeah, that sort of thing.


This is the katabasis.

The what?

Like in literature. In Homer and Virgil and Dante.

Listen to you, Mr Culture. Have you actually read Homer?

I’ve read about Homer.

We studied Homer in Greek.

Fuck off with your Greek.


This is just a tunnel. And it’s barely even a descent. Like what angle is this? Five degrees? It’s dry. It’s quite good shape. It doesn’t smell of piss. It isn’t a crack den. That’s a bonus, right?

Admiring the brickwork. The arch.

It was built really well.

Where does this even lead? Where does it go? What’s the point of this?

They used to send trucks of coal down here. On rails. Down to the river.

It’s open to tourists further down. You can visit. Get the Victoria Tunnel experience. Kids used to come down here.


What are we doing here? How did we end up here, underground.

Blame Sophia. Blame the postgrads. And the paragrads.

What paragrads? The fantasy paragrads? With their fantasy ceremonies?


It’s just … what are we doing here? Why are we here? Why anything? Why this? Why not this? Why the fuck?


It’s dark and it smells musty and there are no signs of human habitation.


So this is leftover World War 2 stuff? Can we just sit here? Isn’t it part of some museum?


Underground. In our underground adventure.


We have to sink down. We have to acclimatise.

We have to give the katabasis some time.


Let’s drink. Let’s swig some wine and see what we find out. See what Livia’s lesson is today. What we’re supposed to learn.


It’s getting darker.

Is it?

It’s getting warmer.


A wall. Rubble.

We can’t go any further.

Good. I’m sick of underground. Of katabasis, or whatever.

What’s supposed to happen next?

Just bathos, as usual. Nothing revealed. That’s our whole life, right?

I think we should share something. Some deep experience. That we all have in common.

I think we should have a therapy session.


There’s no lower we can go. We can’t descend any further.

So when’s that katabasis you were talking about? Has it happened yet?


Is this it? End of the line?

After this, it becomes part of the city sewer system. There’s this culvert that runs into it. Can you hear the river? And after that, much further down, it becomes a museum.

There was an attitude she admired. A stance. Towards everything. Towards Life. Towards ourselves. Towards what we are and were.


We lived in tension with it, the world. We lived against it. We lived in opposition.

We were Sick, but so sick we were well.


This is what we’ve been prepared for. Trained for.

By Livia? Trained?

All along, she was steering us. Taking us in a certain direction. It’s like Karate Kid, or something.


She was trying to fish something out of us. To draw out something deep. To make us …

Make us what?

She saw a potential.

Fuck it, she just wanted to screw with us.

She wanted to turn us into something. Make us better.

Better what – fuck ups?

She wanted to use our fucked upness. Our maladjustment. We were trainable. And our drunkenness.

Sure – our drunkenness.

Our incipient alcoholism. There was a sweet spot between tipsiness and black out. If she could just keep us there …


This is what we’re ready for. We’ve been aimed in this direction. We’ve been prepared for this. Our instincts should kick in.

When? What instincts?


The Gnostics. Is that a good name for a book?

Call it The Idiots.

There’s a Von Trier film called that.

Call it Leviathan. Because that’s what all this is about.

We weren’t part of the world, that was the thing. We weren’t of it. We had no … investment in it, the world.

It wasn’t our world, that was the thing.


We were practically born Gnostic, she said. We had the Gnostic temperament. We were Gnostic Types – naturally.


We knew the rottenness. The poison. We knew the lies.


We didn’t need to be taught disgust. It only had to be awoken in us again, our disgust. To stop us getting too comfortable. That’s what the wine’s for.


Imagine it: a Gnostic philosophy department. Modules on Gnosticism. A Gnostic degree path. What a USP!

Imagine it: an MA. In Gnostic studies. A Research Centre on World-Disgust. We could supervise Gnostic PhDs. Host World-Hatred conferences …


A whole school of thought! A school of anti-thought. A school of anti-philosophy, or non-philosophy. Or not yet philosophy.


Livia saw in us what she had taken years to learn. She saw it in us: as a matter of instinct. As a reflex.

We recoiled against the world. We flinched – a flinching of our whole selves, of everything we are. We shuddered at the world – a shuddering of our whole bodies. Of all we were. We shuddered in thought – and that was our thought. That was our Gnosticism.


Oh, it wasn’t about what we wrote down. It wasn’t about our so-called research. It wasn’t about what we tried to write – our papers. Our essays. The drafts of our books. No, that wasn’t important – none of that.


Our gesture was all. Our flinching – in life! Our instinctive – rejection. Of it all. Of everything.

Our hatred! The way we recoiled – with everything we were.

The philosophy of our lives. The un-philosophy. The non-philosophy. Non-philosophy as a spiritual practice.


Livia’s task was to bring it to the university, our non-philosophy. Livia was to make it show itself. In its strength. Its extremity. And for that she needed to increase the tension. To charge up the field of forces. To work up the Kraftheld, as she called it.

That’s when we’d come into our own. Become what we were, or whatever. Achieve our full Gnosticism. Spread our gnostic wings.


But for that, Livia would have to step aside. She would have to prepare the conditions for it, our Gnosticism. Bring it up against its opposite. Charge up the polarities.

And no longer protect us, Livia! No longer stand between us and the university. No longer hold it at bay, the whole horror.


Livia herself would have to disappear, that was the thing. Livia had to give us the final push – by her disappearance. She’d make way for us. Letting us to become what we were. What we could be.

We were Livia’s little ecosystem. Livia’s rockpool. Livia’s ant farm. Livia’s sea monkeys. We were Livia’s fleas, in her philosophical flea circus. Livia’s whimsy. Livia’s experiment. Livia’s hobby. Livia’s pocket philosophy department. Livia’s toy. Livia’s novelty. Livia’s educational initiative. Livia’s train set. And now Livia had disappeared? Now Organisational Management had taken us over? Now the Organisational Management whale swallowed us whole?

Our stupid talk. Our to and fro.

Livia was a connoisseur of our banter. It’s what she wanted to hear more than anything, our banter. It refreshed her ears, she said, our banter. Her brain! It gave her the impression of life, after all the academic … desiccation.

An accelerant: that’s what drink was. A lifting. An ascent, of sorts. To bring us before the sky. To open the sky. To let us cry up to the sky. And for the sky to open to us.

A roundelay of voices. Like a ceremony. Like some ritual. Taking nothing seriously, let alone ourselves. Laughing at ourselves. Laughing at everything. And even at our laughter – our laughter itself.


A doubled up laughter. That attained … what? Laughter above us. Above our condition. That soared – is that it? Magnificent? Grandly?