Work in Progress

Underground. They were preparing down here. Deepening themselves –

Burying themselves, more like –

But for what. What did they want? What were they looking for?

It was a way of exiting. Of leaving the world behind. They wanted to get out of things. To no longer be dependent …

They weren’t like us, subject to stuff. They didn’t have to justify themselves. Explain themselves in the world’s terms. They didn’t have to account for themselves. They were out of it, and out of everything.

I keep expecting to see Livia in the darkness. Livia, down here, doing her thing.

What about her gnostic dandy rig-out? It’d get dirty. How would she maintain her tight perm? Where would she keep her whippets?

I’m thinking of an underground Livia. A new Livia, with a new look. She’d keep moles, not whippets.

Can you walk moles on leads? Remember, Livia really liked the whippets on a lead look. The whole Billy Mackenzie thing.

She’d have to give up her beret. That wouldn’t be popular.

We’ve got to deepen ourselves: that’s what this is about, our voyage underground. We’ve got to sink. There’s something to be discovered down here, for us. There’s something to be found.

It’s just another way of getting lost. We’re always getting lost, and now we’re getting more lost. Beats being up there, above ground. Beats being lost up there. At least it’s warm. At least the winds aren’t whirling. At least there aren’t snow flurries. And hail – I really hate hail.

All this paragrad fantasy stuff might work on your PhD students … but we’re not as credulous. It’s a story you tell the MAs and PhDs to glorify their general servility and fucked-up lives. It’s what you tell postgraduate students before you tuck them into bed at night. It’s a bedside story to give them hope. The way you distract them from the fact that they’re going nowhere, that there are no jobs, that there’s nothing to do, that it’s all going nowhere but down, down down.

They’re good stories, though.

Sure, they’re good stories.

The crack of doom, that’s what it’s about. It’s round here somewhere. This great … fissure in the earth.

How far down does it go?

All the way down. I don’t know. Very far.

Maybe they disappeared down there. Maybe they threw themselves down.

Is that where the Bug lives, down there?

Is that the crack that’s going to open up and swallow the campus?

We want to turn study into something. We can’t just let study be study. We want study to be transformed …

It’s like the ancient Greeks. All those ancient schools of philosophy. Where it wasn’t about university, or a degree, but a way of living. That’s what Hadot called philosophy as a way of life. The ultimate test of philosophical study was how it changed you. How it became a way of living.

A way of living against.

Sure, that was the Gnostic thing. Actually, Gnosticism comes later. It wasn’t a Greek thing. It was a Jewish thing. It arose out of apocalyptic disappointment. When the messiah didn’t come to wrap up the whole wicked world. When the End didn’t arrive, they wanted to know why. When the messiah didn’t show up, there had to be a reason. So people started to live against the world. It’s in Paul.

What do you know about Paul? Or Judaism? Or anything?

Livia told me. Livia instructed me. Gnosticism is the matrix of all revolutions. All ways of overturning the world.

It’s in Scholem. And Taubes.

Those guys.

Yeah, those guys.

And when our apocalypse doesn’t come …

Then what?

We live against it all. We live against. We live contra. We live opposite. We invert the inverted world. We flip the fucking flipped.

But don’t Gnostics believe in an alien God?

I don’t think you have to believe in that. That’s optional. It’s the against the world stuff that matters.

Yeah, but the real Gnostics believed in the demi-urge, didn’t they? They believed that his world was ruled by the demi-urge, and there was some other god …

The true God and the fake God. God and the devil, basically. God and Satan. God and Lucifer …  So Satan’s in charge of this world and the real God’s, like, faraway. Sounds just like Christianity.

This is too insane. God, I feel like I’m in some cult. There’s too much madness here. We’ve sent each other mad, eight? We’re a fucking cult.

You’re leaving? Where are you going to go?

The mould really bothers me. I mean all this living against the world is all very well, but you have to eat mould?

I think you lick mould. I think you lick it from the walls.

Fuck. Euugh.

Lick it from stones. Like it from the earth. Lick it from the ceiling. Lick it in general.

You can actually chew on it, the mould. It’s like a crust, in places. Like a gremolata.

I think they were trying for some weird kind of immortality. I think they were shooting to live forever – not die forever. Not to be lost in dying. Not to be perpetually destroyed.

There’s a way of studying that’s a way of living. And a waying of living that’s a way of studying. There’s a direction to study. A way OUT.

This is lived philosophy. Marx was wrong: the moment hasn’t passed to realise philosophy. Hadot was right: philosophy’s a way of fucking life. It’s our living. It’s the way we live. Philosophy can be realised in our hatred of the world. And in the gladness of our hatred.

I reckon this is where Livia went: underground. She learnt of the paragrads and thought, fuck the world. Fuck Philosophy. And then sold us to Organisational Management.

Sold us? You think she made money out of it?

It was a spiritual sale. Because she’d had enough. Because she knew that nothing good was going to happen. Not now. Not tomorrow. Not even, in the endless fucking end.

There’s an attitude, right. There’s an ethos. There’s a whole way of being. There’s a lifestyle. It’s totally Gnostic.

The first thing is to increase your contempt for the earth. Increase your hatred. To keep it on your mind perpetually: that this is not your world. That you can repair it or redeem it or whatever.