Work in Progress

Our temperament. Our kind. We’re eschatological by temperament.

We want the countdown.


We’re apocalypticists. That’s our type. It’s only ever permanent catastrophe for us. It’s the endlessness of the disaster. It’s everything sucks over and again.


Annihilation – that’s what we want! The grandeur of annihilation! Nothing tawdry! Nothing mediocre!


To fast-forward to the end. To accelerate into disaster. To press eject on it all. To fire the ejector seat.


We’re the volatiles. We’re the ones who ought to be under control.

Our pathology! Our psychology! We’re all death drive and nothing besides.


Imaginary revenge! On a world in which we never fit in. Never thrived. That seemed raised against us. That seem predicated upon the exclusion of our kind.

Livia was an anti-mentor. She encouraged wildness. Overgrowth. Overambition. Great, windy statements on this and that. On the history of being! On sacred history! On the Same and the Other.


Livia, encouraging our natural inclination to fanaticism. To apocalyptic bias. To the identification of malign entities directing all things.


Carelessness and impatience. Unfounded intuitions. Apocalyptic leaps in the dark.

As though we had no natural thought predators. No analytic philosophers to curb us. To cut us down when we needed it. No one asking for clarity. No one asking to tone down the hyperbole. No one to bring us to heel.


Livia wanted to build up a cell, she said. She wanted a cult. She wanted maniacs. And that’s what she got!

We were her version of the Spice Girls. There was stupid philosopher and pathos philosophy and conspiratorial philosopher and mad Christian philosophy and whatever the rest of us were. Each with something to bring to the team. Each with our special powers. Our special needs. Our deep, deep issues.


Always drunken escalation. Always rushing to judgement. Always mania.

Making vast, emotional claims. Bonding over the abyss. Over world-doom. Exaggerations! Diminished critical thinking!

Where everyone has to match the groups drunken, passionate tone.

Our negativity bias. Our apocalyptic bias. Our everything-is-doomed bias.

Our tendency to expect catastrophic outcomes. To focus too much on extreme conclusions. On worst case scenarios. On the end of the world!

Ignoring more moderate, realistic possibilities … Overestimating how sudden and total and irreversible things are going to be … Thinking from our fear and anxiety … As though everything were about to collapse …

Looking to fill our apocalyptic bingo cards …


Our apocalyptic thinking. Our Manichean thinking. Our mad dualisms of absolute good and absolute evil. Our understanding of life as a cosmic struggle.


The way we’re magnetised by bad news. The way we zoom in on threats.

Our catastrophizing. Our black and white thinking.

It’s group-think, of a sort. It’s a group polarisation. Where we drive each other to ever more extreme positions … Where we reward each other’s madness. Normalise it!

The way we don’t just agree, but intensify each other. In our apocalyptic echo chamber. In our impatience with careful reasoning. With all constructive solutions. In our ideological hothousing. In our drunken hothousing.

Always us versus them. Always goodies and baddies. Nothing is ever moderate for us. Always vortices of panic and hopelessness.


Like we’re always playing apocalyptic bingo. Like we’re looking to fill our cataclysmic bingo cards.


Our apocalyptic frisson. Our apocalyptic thrills.

Driving each other to even greater extremity! Feeding each other’s madness!

Reinforcement, right? Norm shifting. The extreme feels normal to us.

Moderation seems like naivete to us. The greatest naivete!

The local conditions of our thinking. The poor drainage of our heads. The special density of our skulls. The high spuriousness content of our brains.


Newcastle boulder clay. Its special density. Its organic layer. The humus of its topsoil. The glacial till of its subsoil. Its mix of clay and gravel. The activity of Geordie worms and microbes.


The poor drainage of Newcastle boulder clay. Lower yields – but more concentrated flavours. High mineral flavours. An earthy tang.

The old European terroirs of thought.

The brown earths of France and Germany. Thick, with an A-horizon, good for thought crops. The chernozem of eastern Europe – so deep and dark. So fertile. The luvisols of central Europe – full of clay in the B-horizon …

All the graves, in the European oil. The bodies. The fascisms. The … communisms. The revolutions and the failed revolutions.

Thoughts need history. And time. And stuff to think from. Like soil. Like a terroir.  


There are, like, mood terroirs. From which philosophies grow. Springing up from our desperation. And horror. And disgust.


Our mood depths. Our temperaments. What shaped us. Made us. Our histories. Our humiliations. And defeats.

And deepest of all: our idiocies. Our deep stupidity. On which our roots drink. From which our vines grow.

What we are! Most deeply! Our originary history. Our inability. Our impotentiality.


The theological profounds of our idiocy. The philosophical fundaments of our stupidity. The deep buried treasure of our idiocy. We can philosophise from that, too.

You can’t just synthesise wine. It’s about the whole process of cultivation. Of fermentation.

I’m sure it’s just a matter of throwing some chemicals together. Stirring them up. Hey presto – earth. And then you stick some vines in. Let ‘em grow. Harvest them. Wine, right? In fact, you probably don’t vines, or grapes, or earth. You can just cook it all up in a lab.

You can’t have lab grown wine. That’s not how it works.

Don’t be so precious.

The universe, philosopher. What could possibly be wrong with the universe. How could you possibly object?


The most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, right? Don’t you feel like you’re standing on holy ground?


It’s supposed to make you want to relinquish your boundaries. Your desire to organise and manage. It makes you feel small, right? And open.

And worshipful of the great organisational manager in the sky, no doubt.


The grandeur, philosopher. How can you accommodate the fact that it all exists?


Awe takes time, philosopher. Give it time.


Don’t you just want to melt into it?


Don’t you feel a bit godlike, seeing it all? It makes me feel grand. And jubilant.

It’s a monstrosity.


Sometimes I believe in God, philosopher. I have to. Just the idea that God shaped all this. All this awesome universe. And I’m full of reverence.


Awe. That’s the Grundstimmung. Forget your horrific vision.

That’s nature – everything fucking each other. Some sexual free for all. It’s, like, universal incest.


Intercategorial sex, right? General fucking. Just chaos. And distress.


The whole universe is a tumour. A malignant growth. That needs to be cut away.

Cut away from what?

From non-existence.

Somehow, we came to ourselves out there. Somehow, we awoke out there. Somehow, we opened our eyes out there.

Slop opened its eyes! Slop woke up! Slop looked up into the day! We are slop, we said. We are slurry.

An amazing moment. Akin to the origin of life in the primeval soup. Equivalent to the Big Bang, or whatever. Of the awakening of Something from nothing.

We woke and came to ourselves. Our intellects – flashed into existence. Like when sperm fertilizes an egg and there’s that flash. Life – of a sort – began. Thought – so-called thought – came to itself.

God’s zap. God’s lightning. A miracle in the sludge. In the slop. In the mire.


Livia was always astonished at the variations in human intelligence. And she was always amazed that intelligence could burst out of stupidity.

Some kind of negentropy, she said. Some biological leap. Some lightning flash. How did it happen? How did intelligence begin? Miracles were possible, after all.

Were our brains bigger? Our neo-cortex more wrinkled? Did we have more synaptic connections, or whatever?


Livia wasn’t born to brainiacs, of course. But her parents back in Mitteleuropa weren’t stupid. Weren’t basket cases. Weren’t utter idiots, such as you could find beyond the stony wastes.


You can never predict what might happen. What might arise from the human morass. What might be birthed from the mire.

From the ineducable, by and large. From the unreformable. From human dead ends. Human full stops! And yet …

What could account for it? Chaos theory? Complexity theory? What could explain the leap?

It was enough to make you believe in God, Livia said. In divine intervention. That something was steering evolution. That there was a meaning to it all, everything that had happened.

Like the first hominids to walk on two legs. Like those first fish who made their way out of the sea. Grew lungs! Like the first live-bearing mammals.

A kind of progress? A kind of chance, at least. A kind of miracle, at least. A kind of swerve.


You can never predict things, not entirely. You never know what’s going to happen. There are still surprises, after all. The horizon’s never closed. Nature finds a way, and so on.

There could still be hope in the human slop. Brilliance hadn’t been entirely snuffed out. Genius didn’t belong to a bygone age. It wasn’t all dysgenics and de-evolution.

We could place hope in the fruits of random mutation! In randomness! Iin chance!


There should be outreach schemes … attempts to detect what was happening out there.

There really was such a thing as rogue intelligence. Bips of brilliance. Brain bursts.

The miracle of intelligence-in-stupidity. Of brilliance in the boondocks. Of the great cleverness breakout in the most unlikely places.

Even in these times! And in this county! Even in the midst of the disaster! Even at the endless end of it all!


And it’s a raw intelligence! A pure intelligence. Untutored! Unalloyed! Without pretension. Not sure of itself. Of what it is. Not self-aware, not really.

There was nothing, for a long time. Just darkness. And then it came! There it was! Intelligence! In the raw!

How it burned! Illuminating everything around it. Threatening to set the world on fire. Genius, quite real! Genius alive!


And much lower down the great chain of intelligence, our kind. Glowing more dimly. Not blazing out. Not lightning-flashing. Not shouting out its joy of brilliance.

A slightly less dark part of darkness … A slightly less nightly part of the night … That would take an expert to notice. An expert with very keen eyes! And ears! A watcher for signs! A Livia!


Proof that brilliance doesn’t need brilliant parents. That cleverness doesn’t need a breeding line of cleverness. That intelligence isn’t necessarily begotten by intelligence.

Were we throwbacks? Spontaneous mutations? To some forgotten brilliant ancestor? Was it a sign of X-Men-like emergent superpowers?

Was it a question of genetics? Of epigenetics?


Livia, thinking of us, growing up misunderstood. Unappreciated. With clueless parents. With dumb-ass teachers.

Livia, imagining us in our comprehensive schools, surrounded by dunces. With pupil dunces and teacher dunces.

And the sparks of our intelligence, igniting. At our first encounter with TS Eliot’s poetry, or whatever. At our first meeting with set theory. Stifled! Buried! But somehow shining through.

With no one around us having any idea. Not knowing to appreciate us. To nurture us. Not appreciating the leap that we’d taken.

Livia, imagining us doing degrees – everyone does degrees. Finishing top of our cohort – but our cohorts were modest. Pretty shit. Winning MA funding! And, God knows, PhiD funding.

And, most movingly of all, Livia thinking of us turning to Europe. To European ideas. The European heliotropism: how was that possible? How did that miracle happen? How did we break from English empiricism. From English analytic philosophy?

Was it a matter of different temperaments? Of different characters? Of different moods? What woke us up? Why did we turn to the European sun? Why did we cast our gaze over the Channel? Why, to France! To Germany! To Italy! Why – in my case – to the East?

For a time, nourished by the academy. For a time, busying ourselves with reading (so called reading). For a time, learning our languages (so called learning.) For a brief, enchanted time.

Before we were thrown out! Cast out! Before we found ourselves out there again. In the part-time mire!

Without Livia, what would we have been? Where would we have ended up? Without Livia, what would have awaited us? Suicide, of course. Or attempted suicide. Or near-miss suicide. Or parasuicide.

Because there was nothing for us – nothing out there. More part-timism? More precarity? More oblivion? Fewer and fewer teaching hours, year on year …