Work in Progress

Leave us to our mediocrity, postgraduates! Stay away – you’ll be infected! We’ll turn you trivial! Diminish you! Shrink your souls! Kill you off!

You can do better – so much better, postgraduates!

And here we are, sitting in the dark. Sitting under the non-sky. Sitting drinking disgusting wine. As usual! As always! With everything wrong with us! With our whole lives wrong with us! With the anchor of our stupidity pulling us down. With the same idiotic ballast making us sink!

We’ve failed you, postgraduates! Of course we did! We couldn’t help it! We fucked up – yes, yes! What could we do but fuck up?

But we brought you here, into the unknown. We brought you to paragraduate territory. To the philosophical wild. As an apology for taking you to the Organisational Management party.

Can’t you feel the messianism, postgraduates? Doesn’t it tremble in the air? Doesn’t it set you aquiver? Can you feel the paragraduate call? The call of the wild?

We’ve brought you to the brink, postgraduates. The leading edge! The bleeding edge! Beyond us!

Thrive, out there! Fly, fly! This is your kingdom. This is where you need to disappear. Melt away, postgraduates! Disappear!

You won’t miss us, our postgraduates. What have we ever done but disillusion you? Age you? Fill you with our cynicism? Pump you full of weariness?

We don’t deserve you, our postgraduates. And they deserve more than us! So snatch you from the shadows, paragraduates. Whisk you away! Show you how to live!

We’ll leave you with them, the paragraduates. They can have you. Foster you. Bring them to maturity.

We don’t deserve you! We don’t deserve anything! Look what we did to our own youths! Look how we despoiled it, our own potential! We murdered ourselves. Of course we did! We exploited ourselves! We sold ourselves out! We don’t want the same to happen to you!

We give you over to them, the paragraduate faeire. To the paragraduate faerie kingdom!

We put you in their hands. So they can teach you their lessons.

What matters is only that we throw you ahead of us as we collapse. That we free you, by throwing you beyond our lives. Beyond our shadows! As darkness falls over us all.

In the final hour! In our final hour – that perhaps isn’t yours! Give more time. More life! Let them pass over into the messianic kingdom.

Are they listening to us? To our discussion?

Of course they’re listening in! They’re listening and watching. Getting our measure.

Don’t trust us, paragraduates! Don’t help us! Stay away from us! We’re fuck ups! And we’ll fuck you up! Stay pure! Keep your distance! Don’t do a thing for us! Don’t lift a finger! Don’t come to our aid! Save our postgrads, maybe. They’re still pure. There’s still time for them. They could still be save. But us!? We’re too old! Too crooked! Too twisted! Too warped! Too damaged by the world! Don’t save us, save them! Spirit them away! Take them off into paragrad Neverland! Into paragrad Narnia!

The paragraduates will see us for what we are.

And what are we?

Weak! Weak! Undeserving of help.

We need to show them. To prove it to them.

What?

That we’re worth saving! That we’re good for something! That it matters whether we live or die.

If we die, there’ll be no philosophy department.

Do you think they care about philosophy departments?

But they were a philosophy department.

Were – yes. But not now. They’ve long since left that behind. A philosophy department! As if that could mean anything to them. Philosophy as a way of life … that’s different. Philosophy as a spiritual practice … that’s more their kind of thing. It’s as though they were reviving one of those ancient Greek schools of philosophy. The Stoics, the Epicureans, and so on. Where it wasn’t about academia and all that, but about living a certain way.

This is a trial. They’re weeding us out. Seeing how determined we are.

Determined about what?

You have to earn the right to meet them, I’m sure. It doesn’t just happen.

Come on …

They aren’t people like us. They’ve been through things. Trials. And they want us to go through them too.

Please.

The Organisational Management campus was bad enough – but going beneath the Organisational Management campus …

What are we letting ourselves in for? Where are we taking ourselves? Where are we going?

The dimensions of our quest: that’s what we have to remind ourselves of. We have to prepare – philosophically. Spiritually.

You know descent’s all about. You’ve read about katabasis, haven’t you? The old literary trope. Like in Virgil. Like in Dante.

Sure. We’ll come out of this changed. We’ll be unrecognisable. Born again, somehow, from the womb of the earth.

Depth: that’s what we need. Profounds of feeling. Deep despair – not just despair. We should wear the faces of those who have suffered. Who have been through things – life and death things. Spiritual things. Things that we can’t imagine.

The air’s thicker down here. Is there less oxygen or more, underground – I can’t remember.

We have to acclimatise to the depths. It’s like mountain climbers, but the other way round.

What have we learnt, from all our European studies? That we’re unworthy of them, our European studies. That the UK soul is ultimately allergic to everything European.

That we don’t have the depths, the quality of despair, of our European studies! That we don’t have the history. We haven’t been invaded over and again. Fascism never flourished on our soul. Communism! Liberal philosophy is a contradiction in terms. Our culture’s superficial …

We’re not … intellectuals: that’s what we’ve learnt. We can’t call ourselves intellectuals. Let alone philosophers. Or European philosophers!