Work in Progress

Is philosophy actually good for you? I mean, were you a fuck up before philosophy or did philosophy fuck you up? Were you despairing before you read philosophy, or did philosophy make you despair?


Philosophy devours its host from within. That’s what I think.


What went wrong in your childhood? It’s always about the mother. What process produces a Shiva Iyengar? Where does someone like you come from?

We’re running out of time. We’re running in empty. Someone should put us out of our misery. Someone should have strangled us at birth. Tied us up in a sack and thrown us in the river to die. We should never have been allowed to live. Who allowed it? Who gave permission?

Look at Furio – he positively wants to be a martyr. He’d love to be a martyr. He’s dying to be nailed up to something. You come into his own as a martyr, Furio. Too bad it isn’t AD47.


Don’t you want to just pour out your blood, Furio? As a libation. As an offering. Don’t you want to die as a witness to something?

So, leader. Lead us. Where are you going to take us?


I’m feeling more than usually appalled.

Did you hear that? Our leader’s appalled.


Are you going to go messianic? Someone’s got to go messianic. Like the incredible Hulk. The incredible messiah. Is the incredible messiah green?

Will you have special powers? It’ll impress the postgraduates.


She always encouraged your Inian philosophy delusion. You’re I’m-going-to-learn-Sanskrit fantasies. A setting out your Indian philosophy stall thing.


The Hindu cherry on Livia’s cake: that’s you, Shiva. The Hindu icing. A Hindu flavour to my Gnosticism.


You’re the One, Shiva – clearly. You’re the keizat haderach. You’re Flash Gordon. You’ve come to save the universe. Every body, every man every woman every child.


You’re Muad’Dib. You’re Neo. You’re all the SF messiahs in one.


Died from complications of being Shiva.


Your pathos, Shiva. Your horror at poison. And lies. She was harvesting your disgust like adrenochrome.

We’d be understood in Europe.

We’d be reviled in Europe. They’d see through us in Europe.


Our Europe is entirely imaginary. It’s just an anti UK Europe. The opposite-of-the-UK Europe.

Like, literary Europe. Arthouse Europe. The reversal of everything here. The old culture. Vanished profundities. That isn’t all ironical.

Philosophical Europe. It’s the Europe of deep and very deep questions, unlike the UK of thought-solutions.

All we needed was to be left in peace for a few years. Whilst we could play catch up. Whilst we could worked on our languages, ancient and modern. Read the great works. Trace lines of thought through the centuries.

All we needed was our time in the academic sun. What might we become! Our innate brilliance might be revealed at last!

Mightn’t we have things to say? Mightn’t we have hypotheses to explore? Arguments to advance? Mightn’t we make decisive discoveries in texts ancient and modern? Mightn’t we make our name with an original interpretation of this canonical text or that? Might we wow the world with our hot philosophical takes on this or that.

Amazing our peers at conferences. As up and comers. As thinkers of promise. Mountaineers! Ascenders! Young brilliants, with their heads on fire. Lectures with whom all the best postgraduates would want to study.

And Mercia would become the place. The capital of the north for all things European philosophical. They’d talk of the Mercia school, in years to come. Like the Pittsburgh Hegelians. Our ideas cross fertilizing … Cross germinating … We’d become a thought-school. A thought-outpost.

An annual conference in the city. Attracting international attendees. Young lectures wanting to make their name. Post paper conversations giving way to whole evenings of discussion in the pub.

A sense of life and death about thinking. That philosophy was really important. And continental philosophy! Which wasn’t just some outlier madness. Some aberrant growth. Some off the track mutation. That wasn’t just stupidity in the wild.

Even the analytics might see something in us. Might awaken. Might open their analytic eyes. Might mooch around our conference margins knowing that something was up. That things were happening. That a paradigm shift was occurring. That the day of analytic hegemony was done.

We might link up with other sympathetic departments. With genuine European thinkers! Some handy French intellectual might attach himself to our world. Could fly her in. Some stray Italian might find our Mercia conducive to thought. Some departmentally homeless German might lodge themselves in the city. Might move to our provinces.  


Surely they’d give us a few years. Surely they’d let us splash around in the academic paddling pool for a while!

Surely we’d have time to bear philosophical fruit. To emerge from our chrysales! To effloresce! To sing our thought songs!


We still think that we might become thinkers.

We hadn’t reached the final cynicism. The endgame of our idealism – of our dreams of genius. We can still sustain our great alibi.

If only they would make way for us. If only they would step aside for a moment. If they’d only let us come forward. Into the light!

If only it could become our turn! Our chance! Our turn in the academic sun!

That’s it – I’m deciding to die.

You don’t just decide to die.


Seize the day!

I don’t want the day. The day can fuck off.


Every day, some new humiliation ritual.

So close to the centre of the earth. The gravity’s heavier here. We weigh more.. I think we might be more profound. Our thoughts are heavier.

There’s a gravity to our thinking. There’s a depth. There are thoughts we can only have here. Thoughts we can only undergo under the earth. That are thoughts of the earth.


We’re experiencing the full weight of our stupidity. We’re crushed by it, out stupidity. We experience it like fate. Like predestination.


We haven’t died enough. We haven’t died deeply enough. We haven’t discovered the depths of death.

It tastes old, this wine. It tastes senescent. Like it’s the oldest wine that ever was. Like ashes. Like something burnt out, long ago.

It’s posthumous wine, for posthumous drinkers.


Are there anti-sommeliers, who know all the disgusting wines? All the tasting-notes of disgust?


Last wine, from the last harvest. From the last vines. From the last vineyard.


Tastes of rotting – no, this is beyond rotting. Its already rotted. It’s done with rotting. It’s on the other side of rotting.


Ruin wine, right? The thirteenth bottle. Livia’s final lesson. It has a big thirteen written on it. Were we supposed to drink all the wines in order?

We were supposed to drink this last, that’s all I know.


I can taste ashes. I taste earth. Thick, heavy earth. With a side order of ashes.


This wine can’t even be bothered to be disgusting. It’s given up being disgusting. It’s so disgusting that it’s reached the other side of disgusting.


It’s bubbling. It’s like a geyser. Is it going to erupt.


Ingest the poison. Drink it more deeply than anyone. Drink it into your depths.


The Abomination. That’s what you have to become. To know the world as abominable, and yourself as the abomination.


Drink, and the destruction of the world in you will be complete. Disgust will have reached its end.

Disgust will never reach its end.


World encompassing disgust – that’s what we’d like to reach. A hatred greater than the world. A disgust that is greater than the universe – the known universe, the unknown universe. All the dimensions.


Drink it down and maybe you’ll become the true Leader. The Master of Loathing. The Chief of Disgust. The emperor of Horror. The Deepest Gnostic.


The death of God, that’s what we’re tasting. God, rotting in the barrels. God’s rotting corpse: that’s the terroir. God’s festering. God’s fermenting, possibly. God’s decay.


What would an analytic philosopher make of disgusting wine? Would an analytic philosopher drink this? Of course not. Which is why we should drink it. Only the true European philosopher could drink it down.


The thirteenth bottle.

Are there any other permutations of disgust? Is there anything we’ve missed, about disgust? Are there any disgust-avenues that have gone unexplored? What further training in disgust might we need?


In wine is truth.

In wine is death.


Is this anti-wine, like anti matter? Dark wine, like dark matter?


At least we’re disgusted – think about that. At least we feel disgust. At least we’re appalled. At least we’re horrified.


A philosophy of disgust. A philosophy of retching.

The lessons of disgust. The lessons of gagging.


This wine is, like, the concentrated essence of everything.

Of everything that sucks.

Everything does suck.


It’s because we’re wrong that we see the wrong as wrong. It’s because we’re disgusting that we can see the world as disgusting.


The most stinking thing, out of all stinking things. The most festering thing, out of all the festering things …

The most decayed thing, out of all the decayed things. The most rancid thing, of all the rancid things.


Can we get drunk on what we hate?


Can we keep it down long enough to get drunk?

This is the last day, philosopher. The last day there ever will be. This is the day that will stretch forever. And you and I will escape into it.

Will we? And what will we do there?

I don’t know Just rest. Just stay still. We’ll live out our lives in this supernumerary day.


Because I might say something profound. Just by chance. I might wander into a zone of profundity. Something profound might say itself through me. Then you’d have to sit up and take notice, wouldn’t you?


I don’t know anything. I don’t know what day it is. I don’t know what happened yesterday or will happen tomorrow. I don’t know, philosopher.


We’re lost. We’ve been cast out of the succession of days. We’re not part of time, not anymore. Or we’ve found some other relation to time.


And what does eternity say? Does eternity have words? The word, eternity – is that eternity’s word?