Work in Progress

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!

My God! What kind of people were we? How we’d fallen How we’d plunged! How we’d died! But we knew it! We could see it!

Which is why Livia saw it in us: the opposite of potential. The possibility of knowing our potential-less-ness. And therefore who knew potential. She saw it in us: the opposite of the grounds of hope. Anti-messiahs! The last people who could save anything. And who might therefore save everything …

Our postgraduates will never get jobs. We know that. They know that. They sacrificed their futures. For postgraduate glory! For postgraduate salvation!

They’re the last postgraduates, for fuck’s sake. There are no more to come. Our kind, the working-class, idiotic kind, will sink back into the shadows. We’ll leave no legacy.

There’ll be no more PhD’d types to pass through the part-time wringer. The part-time mangle! There’ll be no more of the humiliated. Of the ones starved in soul. No more of the utterly compromised. The completely humiliated. No more of the ones who sold their own souls. Prostitutes of the spirit …

Our capacity to know our humiliation – wasn’t that something? Our capacity to feel stupidity – is that what saved us?

We knew – isn’t that what set us apart? We could stand the truth – about ourselves. We could look at ourselves in the mirror. A terrible sight! The worst sight of all! There we were: failures. There we were: human disasters. But we could bear that… revelation. There we were: the apes of God. But we knew we were the apes of God. We could bear that. We could see that.

And Livia could see that we saw. It set us apart for her – from the first. From when she first saw us in our failure’s corner. In our idiots’ corner. In our don’t-come-near-us corner. In our fuck-ups-and-failures corner. In our don’t-employ-us-under-any-circumstances corner.