Work in Progress

Our first summer, after the Board of Examiners. After the last Board of Studies. After graduation.

The summer, opening out. The summer, wide.

Like the summers of our PhD years. Like the summers of our distant childhoods.

The limitless. The Open. The infinite reach of summer.

 

Setting sail – when you can’t see the other shore.

 

Freed into summer. Given over to it. To summer. To the summer process.

 

Summer weeks, in the infinite. When the campus had died down. Except for foreign students. Come for academic English study courses.

 

Writing under the summer vault. In the summer halls.

Hatching into summer.

 

Summer writing. Summer in our sentences. Summer air in our prose.

 

The great rhythm of the academic year. It’s great turning, the academic year. Around the summer – around the fulcrum of summer.

 

The summer orbit of academia. The revolution around summer – the infinite expanse of summer.

 

Summer writing time. Summer reading time.

What was our reading project this year? Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in the original? Science of Logic, in the original? The complete Aquinas – the fucking lot – in the original? The entirety of Kierkegaard, the whole oeuvre, and learning Danish to read it along the way?

 

Summer ambition. Summer scale.

Chocs away, into summer skies.

Who did we imagine we’d be? What did we imagine we’d do this summer?

What was this summer’s need? This summer’s project?

What voyage would we take into the history of philosophy? Into the really hard stuff we never would have read otherwise? For which we’d never have the time.

Think big, we told ourselves! Think oeuvres! Think collected works! Think new languages!

 

Taking summer flight, borne up by summer wings.

 

In our summer offices. Fans blowing air, moving drowsily from side to side, in our offices.

 

The near-empty campus. The older lecturers – the old professors and the like – gone overseas for summer. Gone on holiday! Gone to conferences! Gone to holiday lets! Gone to gites, God knows. Gone to summer somewhere European.

And as happy just to be. Happy with campus peace. With the summer trance.

To work. To write: wasn’t that the ambition? Wasn’t that what we were about?

 

What language were we going to learn, this summer? Was this Danish summer (for Kierkegaard)? Should we learn Italian? What about Latin. Latin must be a good one.

 

Summer pacing. Summer cam. The summer measure, weeks going by. Blown like dandelion seeds by summer.

 

Summer of potential. Dreaming of what we could write. Of what we might read. Everything in the conditional. If only, if only.

 

Inexhaustible summer. That we’ll never be able to use up.

The summer condition. Summer without beginning and without end.

 

Work, yes, but souffle-light. Summer light. Work – but work with air inside it, like kneaded bread.

 

Work – but not focus. Work – but nothing productive.

Idled work. Work without work – that was more of a non-working than work.

Worklessness – but actively so – joyfully so.

Idling in work. As work. Unfolding work into the sky. Letting work blossom.

 

Non-work, where the non- was not privative. Where the non- was a shattering-open.

 

The song of work. What work always wanted to be. A giving up of work in work. A relinquishment. A laying down of tools, but in work.

Non work, that says, nothing will happen again. That says happening does not happen. Non-working that says, give it up – give everything up. But does so in work, and as work.

 

Work – rather, the contemplation of work. Work as contemplation – as detached from work, fallen out of step with it – and with everything.

 

Time outside time – summer outside summer. The eternal promise of summer that never arrives and never could arrive. That never begins, but is there nonetheless.

The unreal summer. Drowsy. Heavy Turgid. As though underwater. Summer through which we swim.

 

Heavy days. Humid days. Threatening to gather in a final thunderstorm. To gather up in a cloudburst.

Unstable summer. Menacing summer. Was it from these summer clouds from which lightning will come?

 

Summer slipped out of phase. Summer escaped from summer. On another track. Summer sidelined, Summer shunted.

 

Summer curtains in the breeze. The summer culmination. Summer billowing.

 

The brow of summer.

 

Turbulent summer. Turbid summer. Summer that seeks release. That seeks cloud burst. Cumuli-nimbus stacked kilometres high. Towering. Greying. Full of rain. Gravid with lightning.

 

The other summer, like Blanchot’s other night.

 

To have time – the gift of time. The openness of time. The cry of time.

 

The summer of study. When study respires. Where stupidity breathes.

 

The summer of summer. The ultimate summer. Summer squeezed into a glass.

The great postgraduate song of yearning. The great postgraduate plaintiveness. The song of no prospects. Of no future. Of massive debt. Of maladjustment.

The song of overeducation. Of surplus intellectuals! The postgraduate song for Europe – for European philosophy.

 

There are too many of them. The dangerous class – the postgraduate class. An intelligentsia with nothing to do but foment revolution.

Your Heidegger tribute act. Your trad Heideggerian bullshit. 

 

Helmut’s battle against, like, the whole of technology.  One man, armed only with Heidegger books. In translation.

 

What’s Organisational Management all about, Helmut? The essence of Organisational Management is … What's the answer, Helmut?

 

Good thing you started growing your Dostoevsky beard, Helmut. That’ll keep you warm.

 

How are Schubert’s greatest hits? Do they drown out the vulgarity?

 

Helmut, singing Schubert, learnt phonetically, by heart.

I’m a fuck up, philosopher. I’m a bad robot. I couldn’t say what the wanted me to say. The way I was supposed to say it. My programming failed. I had to be repaired.

 

Do we have souls, philosopher? Is this what the soul is? Is this how it cries, the soul? Is this how it opens upwards? Outwards, the soul?

 

I want to play truant for the rest of my life.

 

Does my madness make me a philosopher?

Philosophical, maybe.

 

It’s like Organisational Management is falling apart in me.

 

Your very presence is licensing this. Making me say these things. Why is it one way, philosopher? Why can’t you say organisational things? Or managerial things?

 

Do you think everyone feels like this, or is it just us? Are we, like, the last existentialists?

 

I think I’m malfunctioning. I think I must be a bad robot.

Do you ever worry about what you’re serving? About where all the money comes from? About who you’re organising and managing for? Whose interests are you serving?: do you ever think about that?

We’re just trying to make the world a better place.

Organisational Management middle management, just following orders.

Now you sound like a conspiracy theorist.

 

You want to find totalitarianism in the absence of totalitarianism. Where there isn’t any totalitarianism.

We’re totally benign. We’re just trying to solve things. To make life easier. And more … equitable. And to treat the Earth properly. And to stop being nasty.

 

You just want something to say no to. And now you have a whole campus to say no to.

 

People will like living here – you’ll see.

 

Organisational Management is very ecological. Very renewable. We’re very green, philosopher.

I didn’t ask to be born: isn’t that all philosophy says? Like some petulant adolescent? What’s the point of making your students question, like, the terms and conditions of existence? Why are you teaching them how to be miserable? About all the things that are fucked up about the world?

 

A philosophy degree is just license for unemployment.

Ice wine – is that an actual thing?

It is in Austria.

What about snow wine? What about wine popsicles?

 

Ah, that’s the wine song.

The wine song?

All great wines sing, that’s what Cicero said.

She meant that figuratively.

 

Why is it humming Ode to Joy? Why can’t it be humming Shostakovich?

I forget about your spurious connection with Shostakovich.

What’s the music that plays over the closing credits of a civilization? That’s what the wine should be humming.

 

Can you just apply it, like a wine run? Drink it through your skin? It’ll have the same effect, won’t it?

 

If only it was mulled. Use your psychic powers to mull it, Fiver.

Cicero wanted some Hindu lunacy. Hindu ardour. She wanted to bring in some maniac of sacrifice. Relight the Hindu fires. To sound the great Hindu howl.

 

Cicero always liked your Hinduism. She’d always quiz you about it. She took it quite seriously, your Hinduism. Unless that seriousness was part of the joke.

We didn’t expect much from life, did we? We never thought it would turn out well. That we’d actually be functioning citizens. That we’d ever actually have some kinda job, let alone an academic one. That we’d even be alive. That we’d actually reach our thirties. Fuck. I’m shocked just to be alive.

I can hear a groaning. I can hear a moaning

It’s the weight of Organisational Management towers upon the earth. A terrible weight. The foundations, just above our heads, and pressing down.

And the earth is protesting. And the earth is crying out. There’s the song of the crushed earth. That wants to throw the weight off it shoulders. That wants to rise up, as it did when the glaciers melted, after the last Ice Age.

 

The underearth, moving, always.

There are torsions. There’s tearing.

The earth falls in the earth. The earth shifts in earth.

There are rivers of earth within the earth. Dark currents.

The urgrund. The abgrund. The groundless ground. The earth abyss.

 

The roots of their world. The foundations of those buildings come down so deep. The pylons they stuff into the earth. That they cram down. That they press down. That they drill all the way down. Almost as far as where we are.

It all rests on this. This unmoving earth. But what if the earth moved? It could happen, couldn’t it?

Are there earthquakes here? In the northeast?