Work in Progress

But the paragrads are actually destructive. They only ever destroy the world a little more. They only ever work to make it worse.

But that’s only the direction the world is going in.

But why make it worse? Why not try and repair it, a little. Like the cabbalists, or whatever … Why didn’t they seek out the divine sparks. Reunite them. Bring them together – all the good things. Repair the world as it is. Why wasn’t it about more life for them? Why was it always more death?

We’re still too attached to the world. We still have too many connections to it. We still believe in it. We still have jobs for fuck’s sake …

So we should give up our jobs?

We need the courage. We need to find a way out of it all. Out of everything that fucks us up. Everything that’s destroyed us. We need to be undestroyed. We need to be undemolished.

We need to be our studies. And what we study. The what should become the how, the how of life. The method of living. A method without fucking method.

We need to live out our contempt. Live out our hatred. Go out of the world. And towards something else …

Like the paragrads.

Sure, like the paragrads.

The paras didn’t need an outside. They lived inside. They were going inside. They were going deep. They were sinking deeper. That’s what it was about.

I mean, who was going to miss them? They’d already been lost to philosophy. Philosophy had already swallowed them up. It was going to swallow them up some more.

Why did the paragrads always want to live in the ruins?

Because the world was ruined – spiritually, at least. They wanted to live in truth. They wanted to be departing – like, perpetually departing. They obeyed a call – Moses’s call. Abraham’s call. They were a people on the move – spiritually, not actually. Which calls for ruination. Which means slash and burn. They didn’t want the world to have a hold over them. They didn’t want to be crushed by the world.

They were tramps, in other words. They were just more disgustings in a disgusting world. More filth in a world of filth.

They knew the present form of the world was ending. They had no investment of the world as it was. They knew it was passing, that everything is passing. They lived in the end – at the brink of the end. As the end ended. But the end was always ending.

There’s a way of living in the endtimes. There’s a way of being in the endless endtimes.

Lived Gnosticism – just what Livia was looking for.

Maybe Livia joined them. Maybe she went underground.

This … darkness. It’s kind of glowy. There are glowing things on the wall.

It’s a glowing mould.

Mould’s what the paras cultivate. They actually live on mould – on different kinds of mould. There are moulds for all purposes under fucking heaven for the paragrads.

The paras had no sky. How did they cope?

They had an earth-sky. They had the sky of boulder clay.

They had no light.

They had mould light.

They had no food.

They had mould. Very good for you, mould. Like blue cheese mould. Other mould. And they fermented stuff. They’re very into fermented food.

Yay paragrads.

Brainfood – they were really into that. It was all about brainfood. About eating right.

What’s terrible is the way they’ve mobilised the Newcastle earth. How they’ve made Newcastle boulder clay simply something to crush us with. As though it were simply their medium. Their way of smothering of us. When we always thought the Newcastle earth was on our side.

How are going to relieve the pressure? I think we need a lumbar puncture, or something. A skull puncture.

We need fucking trepanning. To crack open the skull. There are people who swear by that – trepanning. Let the air in. Let the air circulate around the brain.

We’d need a drill for that. Has anyone brought a drill? Trepanning’s good for thinking, apparently. Some of the greatest philosophers were trepanned. Deleuze wasn’t anyone before his trepanning. Guattari did it with a hand drill, apparently. It was a real ‘60s thing.

I’ve got an underground headache. Does being underground give you headache?

Fiver’s got a nosebleed.

Get him to lie down. Lie down, Fiver. Tilt your head back. God, look at what they’re doing to our departmental seer.

Our seer hasn’t been very seer-y lately. Give us something, Fiver. How about a vision?

This is where we should plant the explosives. Like Guy Fawkes did, right? Blow it all up.

Have you got any explosives?

Maybe we should think of mental explosives. There are other kinds of war. Like, demoralisation tactics. All the stuff those Chinese generals wrote about. And those Russian defectors.

So we’re going to demoralise the organisational managers? That’s how we’re going to fight back? Maybe.