Abasement. Abomination. Lower and lower. All the way down.
This is the katabasis, right? A farcical katabasis. A decent that isn’t a descent, not a real one. Not to the centre of the earth. Not all the way to hell.
The tunnel, echoing with our stupidity. Just sounding out our stupid words.
My God what are we? What have we become?
How did we live? How did we think? Were those thoughts? Could we even call them thoughts?
What did we do with philosophy? With the philosophy we inherited? With the whole history of ideas that was passed down to us?
What did we do, with all the books we read? With all the books about books that we’ve read? With all the introductory guides to the books about books that we’ve read?
How we’ve failed ourselves. How we’ve failed everything. How we’ve failed philosophy – and the great philosophers, who burn above us, in their firmament. Who burn in their constellations above us, in the philosophical sky.
We didn’t do anything good with our lives. We didn’t do anything right. And now here we are, in our Wrongness. We who should never have been here. We who were brought here as a joke. (A joke played on what. On who?)
And we can’t even laugh at ourselves properly. Our laughter isn’t loud. We don’t laugh from our chest. From our guts. Our laughter doesn’t reach all the way down. Our laughter doesn’t encompass everything. Our laughter isn’t a laughter at everything, and ourselves included.
And now we’re deep beneath the world. Now we’re deep under all things. The world should crush us. And we should feel crushed. And we should feel destroyed. We should feel done for.
We haven’t risen to disgust. Our disgust isn’t complete. We haven’t reached it, disgust. We haven’t gone all the way.
Even now, even underground … Even buried down here … Even interred down here … It’s not complete, it’s not finished, our disgust. We haven’t died to ourselves, as we should have. We haven’t risen anew from our completed disgust. In our finished despair.
The horror doesn’t roll through us. The horror at the poison. The horror isn’t thunder inside us. We haven’t sunk to the very bottom.
There’s still room in our despair. We can still stretch our limbs, walk about, in our despair. Our despair’s still capacious. Still big enough. We can still breathe in our despair, and we shouldn’t be able to breathe. We should still be feeling suffocated by our despair. We should be gasping.
And the lies. The lies aren’t intolerable enough to us, not yet. The lies don’t disgust us enough. We still speak. We shouldn’t be able to speak. With these words. With all the words.
Because all the words are foul. Because all the words are contaminated. And we should just sit in silence forever. We should just die. Not even die – just perish. Just … wink out.
And not even the grandeur of a death. Not even the dignity of a death. We shouldn’t be able to die. Death’s too good for us. Death’s something we can’t attain. We can’t rise to its level or sink to its level, death.
We should just … decay … just rot to vileness. Just bubble in foulness. Just froth, bubbling and frothing. Like the froth from the mouth of a rabid dog.
Everything in my body, everything in my taste buds. Everything in my brain is saying, don’t drink this.
I really shouldn’t be drinking this, I know that. This is straight poison, nothing else.
Do you think Livia wants to poison us? Did she want to kill us?
Deep foulness. It can’t get any worse, can it? This can’t be good for us, can it?
Ah, the lessons of vileness. Like we actually need to become more Gnostic.
We’re abasing ourselves, as usual.
Livia’s abasing us. From a distance. From wherever she is.
We’re pushing abasement to the max. Defilement. But why? What’s it for?
It’s a joke – don’t you see? Livia’s joke. That we would look to the disgusting for salvation. The joke’s on us. On you, anyway – on you guys. Who are just Livia’s … imitators. Her fan boys and girls.
I’m not drinking this, and nor should you. Look at you all, passing round the bottle. Can’t you be your own people?
What are we tasting?
General putrescence. Rotting.
The rotting of what?
I don’t know … the universe.
Inside the horror: that’s where she wants to put us. We’re drinking from inside the horror.
Auto purgation. Auto catharsis. An enema of the mouth.
What we’re disgusted by is important.
We’re made by our disgusts. Founded upon them.
Vomiting – that’s the overcoming of disgust.
Disgust is a state of emergency. Of the soul. Of the body.
I’m disgusted, therefore …
Therefore, what?
God. All these different ways to be repulsed. All these different disgustings. All the foulness.
Is this what the end of the world tastes like? Is it end of the world wine?
It’s the endless end of the world, which is worse.
What is this wine becoming inside us? What is in changing us into?
There’s some deep process at work. Some deep … fermentation. As though we were living barrels.
It’s fallen wine. Wine for the fallen. For the fallen to drink.
The baseness of all things. The rotting of all things. The putrescence of it all.
The great disgust. I can taste it. The self-disgust of the world. The way the world doesn’t want to be. Its … self-repulsion. Its hatred of itself. Its infestedness. Its infestation – of itself.
Auto disgust, basically. The whole festering sore. The great wound. What we know, what we taste, is what knows that it should not be. That none of this should exist at all.
We’re drinking the catastrophe, don’t you see? To intensify the horror. And the disgust. To increase it. To deepen it, even.
Yes, we’re horrified by what we’re drinking. But that’s as it must be. Because we’re horrified by our living. By our continuing to live. By our being alive. By our still being alive in this world! Amidst the poison! And the lies!
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.
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.
This wine is a decomposition. It’s a rotting.
A rotting of what?
Of everything. Of the entire world. The whole lot.
The great disgust, Nietzsche calls it. And that’s the greatest danger, he says: the great disgust. Nothing’s more risky. It’s nihilism, pure and simple.
Disgust is a rejection. But the point is to overcome disgust. To reject our rejection. To turn the no into a yes.
You have to feel disgust at disgust. A disgust at your disgust.
Like, second-degree disgust? Complicated.
We need disgust. As a catalyser. As a necessary condition.
We need to reach the great disgust and overcome it. We need to say no to the no to life.
We have to become convalescents. Go through the sickness. And the illness. We need to see it as a test.
Beyond disgust: that’s where we have to get to. Disgust is something that needs to be overcome, and so on.
Disgust has to become a fountain of pleasure. We have to say yes to what our senses reject. Mastery. Right?
We have to move from becoming no-sayers to become yea-sayers.
‘Are poisoned wells necessary, and stinking fires, and dirtied dreams, and maggots in the bread of life?’
A reversal. A revaluation. Of baseness. Of all disgusting things.
You have to be able to bear the thought of the eternal return of this wine. Of It’s coming back again and again. As if we were to perpetually ruminate on this wine. Endlessly regurgitate it …
We need to love the wine. To savour the wine. All its disgust notes.
To love all the disgusting things. Including ourselves! Especially ourselves!
To be able to bear it – but more than that, to love it.
The depths of disgust. The deepest depths. The abyss of disgust. To be able to bear it and affirm it and love it and all that.
The immanent conversion of the disgusting. The immanent … transformation.
The immanent transfiguration of all the foul things. Changing the meaning of the world.
But that’s impossible, isn’t it? You can’t just affirm this world. You can’t just discover this wine to be delicious. You can’t pretend.
There has to be something else – breaking in. Something from without. Something contentless. A void. The void.
Is the void disgusting? What does the void taste like? What does anything taste like?
No one’s asking you to lick the void. Or to sniff it.
An exorcism – that’s what this wine is. A way of driving the devil out of our mouths. Of throwing up the phantom. It’s a purgative – sure. A scouring out of ourselves. A driving out of the anti-angels. Of the bad seraphim. It’s a casting out.
That’s why this wine’s necessary. It’s part of a process – a dreadful process, but a necessary one. It’s an ethos. It’s a discipline. It’s what we need. It’s medicine – in the form of anti-medicine. It’s the cure – in the form of poison.
What are we tasting? The European curse. The European dregs.
The European poisoning. Different from the UK poisoning. With different notes than UK poison. A bit of variety compared to UK poisoning …
Maybe we’re tasting this wine with analytic philosophy lips. If we taste it with European philosophy lips, then …
We need to vomit up everything. We need to vomit so hard that we vomit ourselves up. That we vomit up the universe inside us.
We need to vomit ourselves inside out. Like, total expulsion. We need to thrown up our stomach linings. Turn ourselves inside out.
Can you throw up your soul, do you think?
We want to throw up ourselves. We’re disgusted with ourselves, first of all. We want to retch up ourselves. To spit ourselves out.
We want to expel ourselves. To be nothing other than this expulsion. This voiding.
We want to retch ourselves up – the old us. Who we once were. We want to throw ourselves up – everything we are. We want to expel it all – to expel ourselves. To expel the world in us. To vomit it up.
We must become an act of expulsion – nothing more. A violent exiting of ourselves. A continual exodus – through ourselves. Through our own bodies. Through our digestive tracts …
As though we could throw up everything we are. Everything we have been. As though we could just hurl out the poison. Our poisoning – all the lies. As though we could eject it all.
Some act of expulsion. Some casting out. Of ourselves! Of who we are! Of who we have been! Of what we’ve been made into! Of our wretchedness! Of our fallenness!
Have we reached peak disgusting now? Come on, this has to be it.
What is this wine doing to our internal organs?
Is this wine giving us cancer? What I it doing?
Is the poison a cure in some sense? Like in homeopathy.
In homeopathy you’re supposed to have the tiniest drop of something. Not, like, swig after swig.
You can’t actually sip it, this wine. It’s too unbearable sipping and knowing that there are more sips. It’s too disgusting, like that there’s more to drink. You have to get it down in one go.
Get it down you. Chug a fucking lug.
Don’t get all frat boy.
Take your medicine.
Medicine!? This is poison.
Gulp, motherfucker.
Work in Progress 