Work in Progress

The usual nihilism. The confirmation of nihilism. But our nihilism doesn’t even have any depth. It’s just an … emptiness.

Our emptiness. Our hollowness. While we wait to be inhabited by some … evil spirits. Demons, or whatever.

Still alive – that’s the problem. We’re still alive. There’s still more life to live. There’s still time, still life. In breath is hope, or whatever. The continual … humiliation of our lives. The continual … senselessness. This barrage of senselessness. This continuous assault and battery.

As if we were ever going to get anywhere! As if anything, anywhere, were actually going to happen! As if … we weren’t dead yet. As if we were still alive. As if everything hadn’t just played out. As if anything were ever going to happen for us.

We can’t go any farther. Where have we ended up? Nowhere. A dead end.

Of course it’s a dead end. What else could it have been? What did you expect? Did you actually expect anything?

So cynical. So much more cynical than us. So much more … dead.

That’s what we have to be: dead to hope. Dead to possibility. Which you can only be when you’ve been fooled over and again. When you’ve fooled yourselves. When everything fools you. When you let it fool you.

False hope: that’s all we’ve ever wanted. Consolation. But consolation for what? For having no consolations.

It’s not even that deep. It’s not even a proper katabasis. Hardly the profounds of Newcastle, is it?

Always a farce. The descent was a farce. The quest was a farce. There were no depths. There is no crack of doom. This is the usual play-pretend. The usual farce.

Deepen the farce, right? Livia would approve.

It needs a soundtrack. Play us some music. Read us some poems. Do you know any poems by heart? Give us succour.

How about a Bible reading, Io? Something to cheer us up in our hour of need. Read some of that Book of Job stuff. The sons of the morning and so on. Read us some Ecclesiastes. So we know that someone felt this before.

Something from the gospels, maybe. A parable. We need something. We’ve come to the end of the road. Literally.

Can you smell the piss? Something pissed here. Someone pissed.

And someone was pissed. Look at these beer cans. Someone was pissed down here. Should we get pissed down here?

The paragrads had given up hope. Hope in the world. Hope in the university. The paragrads … didn’t need hope. They went underground in perfect hopelessness.

All the while hoping for something underground.

It was a chance for them to re-gather themselves. To consolidate. To pause. To gather strength. To pause for a while, and to decide what to do. It was a hibernation, of sorts. They wanted to close their eyes for a while.

So do we!

They wanted to lie down in the bosom of the earth. And why wouldn’t they? And why wouldn’t we?

They wanted the blessing of the earth. They wanted the truth. They wanted to be exposed to what the earth was.

And what is the earth?

This, just this. Darkness. Heaviness. Just – itself. Resisting. Everything placed on top of it.

Resisting? How?

Our latest idiot-quest. What’s our motivation?

Stupidity.

What is that we want?

Not to be quite so stupid.

What’s the outcome going to be?

Deeper stupidity.

Will our stupidity ever become profound, do you think? Will it ever have depths?

No.

Maybe Nimrod’s dead. Maybe all we’ll find is Nimrod’s tomb. Maybe all we’ll find is NOTHING.

We’re too late. Wasn’t that always our story? We were too late to make sense of it all. Too late to … find out what we’re for. What we can do. We were always posthumous. We’re the sort who come after, you know that. We’re the kind who miss the party.

Waiting for some Orphic thing. Some initiation thing. The revitalising darkness, or whatever. The scene of some kind of earth-conversion.

But there is no secret in the earth. Except the secret that there are no secrets.

Maybe if we took something. Maybe if we drank something … it would become clearer.

What – what should we take?