Work in Progress

We never understood her, Livia.

Of course we didn’t. She was twice our age – more! On the verge of retirement! And she was always broader than we were. She’d come from another world – an Eastern European world.

She could have been awesomely good or awesomely evil. We couldn’t tell. We couldn’t read her. We couldn’t understand her.

She was beyond us. She came from another world. She knew things. She knew things. The whole of maths … of physics, as well as philosophy.

We didn’t know her plans, Livia. Her purposes were alien to us. The game she was playing with the university. Her Great Game.

And there was her philosophical game. We could hardly grasp her philosophy. I think we’re only beginning to get it now, her philosophy. Her Gnosticism. Her anti-worldism.

Our drinking lesson. Our drunken lesson. Our Livia tutorials.

This is all we have of Livia now. Her wine. The wine she collected. That she put aside, after her departure.

Her cellar, as she called it, but it wasn’t really a cellar. There were a few bottles. Thirteen, I think. That’s all.

Thirteen bottles! And how many have we drunk? How many do we have to go? What are we going to learn after thirteen bottles?

We’re supposed to hate it, this world. We’re being taught to hate it. Not to trust it. To look beyond it. To taste beyond it.

We’re to look upwards. And away. Never to be taken in. Never to be deluded.

No – we have to convert the poison. Turn the poison into something good. Is that possible? To convert the world, maybe.

It shows us the curse, this wine. It’s a curse – the whole thing. We know that. The poison that flows inside us is only a … confirmation. The lies we hear. They’re all part of the logic of the world, of the world’s unfolding.

In wine is truth, right? We know our compromise. We know we’ve been thrown into an abyss. Just by being born. Onto this planet. Into this world.

The original sin – is that it? To have been born at all. To be alive at all. To have lived at all. That’s the sin. This wine teaches us that.

Livia’s wine is the truest of wines. There’s nothing truer. It shows things. We’re seeing. We’re alert. Our ears are pricked up. We’re attending to it all. The whole … show. The theatre – their demonic theatre.

In wine is truth, right in this wine.

What is it true about?

The world – the state of the world. All things that are. It’s true about the Great Poisoning. And the Great Disabling. About what’s been done to us.

About the lies, too. The wine shows us the lies. We hear the lies as lies. We taste the poison as poison. We’re disgusted by what we should be disgusted by.

We woke in disgust. We came to be in disgust.

Nothing was ever unpoisoned. It was poisoned from the start. It began in poison and continues in poison. There was no truth – not from the start. It began as lies and continues with lies. That’s our original sin.

The pinnacle of our disgust. The summit of our disgust.

We have to climb upward. There’s an … ascent. A scrabbling upwards. And isn’t that our drinking?

We’re going up. We’re not clinging to the world. We’re fleeing from it. We’re scrambling upwards.

All the poison. The poisoned air. The poisoned rain. The poisoned lakes and rivers and seas. The poisoned earth.

The thickness of the poison. The way it presses down into everything. The way it’s fill our every particle. Saturates our every atom.

The way lies fill our ears. The way we hear nothing but lies. The way we lie to ourselves.