Our recovery time. Our rehabilitation. Our hospital – because wasn’t that what it was: a hospital. For our convalescence. From life! Our recovery from life!
We were allowed a few years out. From the world! From the logic of the world! We’d been allowed to lie in a hammock, of sorts. The humanities hammock, in the humanities sun. In the old university sun.
We’re the remnant.
We have old souls. Old campus souls.
Remembering. Our first days. When we first arrived. When Cicero showed us our offices. Our eyes full of wonder! We were naïve back then. We were unworldly. We wanted to forget about the world. We’d spent too long in the world
Imbibe, motherfuckers!
If only we could stomach it, this wine … If only we could keep it down.
Poison knew itself in us. Lies knew themselves in us. Poison and lies cried out, in us. Poison that doesn’t want to be poison. Lies that don’t want to be lies. In us! In our torsion! In our truth telling – because that’s what it was: truth telling. Because we told the truth, in our own way. We were the only ones who told the truth. Because lies were intolerable to us! Because poison was always too much!
Self-disgust – that’s what we’re supposed to feel. Disgust at ourselves for being dependent on this. For being subject to it all.
The purest self-disgust. The strongest self-disgust. Self-disgust become a superpower. But a superpower for what?
For world-hatred and self-hatred.
What are we searching for in our disgust? What is being revealed to us through our disgust? That everything is disgusting? That the world is disgusting? The fact that we’re not entirely subject to it, the world. That we’re not entirely a part of it, the world. That something in us can say, no.
I want to feel the hatred. Inside me. The world turning its true face towards us. And to meet the world in hatred – in perfect hatred.
We weren’t supposed to love it, the world. We were supposed to be appalled by it, the world. Which we already were, in part …
Our instincts were right, Livia said. We only had to be encouraged.
We have to be vigilant! Alert! For the new ways we’re being lied to. The new ways in which we’re being fooled. We mustn’t relax our guard …
The rich European terroir – all its flavours, all its nuances. Gone! There’s no richness left. No nuance.
Poison and lies: that’s the European terroir, just as it’s the terroir everywhere.
The only terroir is poisoned and the only wine is poisoned wine. Everything else is a lie.
Which is why disgust is our truest response, our first response – and it must be our response to everything. They’ve poisoned the air. They’ve poisoned the earth. They’ve poisoned us – God knows. They’ve left nothing alone. They’ve turned everything disgusting. And that’s what we have to know. A new kind of wine drinker: that’s what’s required. A new non-connoisseur. The anti-gourmand who drinks only poison. A poison without flavours. Without nuances; just poison.
Livia’s wine, as a philosophy. Who brewed it? Where did it come from? What vines produced this? From what grape did it come? In what barrels was it left?
We have to try and understand what Livia wanted for us.
So we should drink.
Of course we should. Drink! Drink! Of course. That’s all we can do! It’s pretty much all we know how to do!
Work in Progress 