Work in Progress

Every day is the day of wrath. Every day is the last day. The world is burning – why can’t they see that?

Amazing we’re still alive. You don’t have to do much to be still alive, do you?

We were part of Cicero’s department soup. We were her philosophy dept ingredients.

 

Anyway, it was Cicero who put all this in motion. Who pressed go. She brought us together to see what would happen. We were Cicero’s experiment.

Cicero’s plan, more like. Cicero was always ahead of us.

Cicero just found a way to use us. To deploy us. We’re her soldiers.

 

And she decided we needed to be slammed into the Organisational Management oven. That it would wring even more pathos from us. That it would increase our existential charge of our lectures. Make us even more intense.

Sure, Cicero wouldn’t be there to savour it. But she could imagine it.

European wine to British lips. We can’t take it, undiluted. It’s too much for us. Too heady.

We have to water it down with secondary commentary.

 

Drunk with it, European philosophy. Thinking we can do it: European philosophy. But we can only ever do drunken impressions of European philosophers.

 

Philosophy’s only about the absence of philosophy now. About the impossibility of philosophy – of the conditions of philosophy. It’s about why you can’t do philosophy. Because its conditions have disappeared.

 

Philosophy belongs to our kind now. It’s been turned over to us.

 

Pathos is our business in European philosophy.

Pathos is what we do.

 

Repackagers of European ideas. That’s what we are.

What is this wine? What’s the grape? 

Priya, shrugging her shoulders.

A virtual grape, maybe. From a virtual vine. Grown from a virtual terroir. Probably made of algae.

 

You guys think you’ve solved wine. That this is a wine solution. Offending no one. Never going off. That’s never corked.

They have to desecrate. That’s where they get their energy. They can’t create, only desecrate. Only destroy. Only tear down. Only make some grinning parody.

That’s why all this is demonic. These are their Satanic rites. This is their strangulation of what is good and true.

 

They don’t know peace. They can’t rest, these demons. They can’t lie down and put these thoughts out of their heads.

See they torture themselves, too. Because they will not receive the light. Because they won’t turn the corner.

They could be saved, if they wanted to be. If they would only ask. They don’t have to be grotesques. They could be consoled.

 

There’s no limit to their desecration. It’s how their live, through desecration. Their deliberate blasphemy.

They will never have done with obliterating the face of God.

 

They’ll never ask for help. If they only asked for help.

They must know what they’re doing. They must know the one who they’ve placed themselves in service.

Do they understand what they’re doing. How they’ll be punished, one day?

The wrath of God: do they believe in that? Do they fear that?

I’m afraid – for them. I will pray, for them.

We’re all dead, but death hasn’t caught up with us yet.

 

Because we aren’t alive. And they cannot let us die.

 

What have we spent our whole lives doing, and what for?

What’s wrong with us? What’s right with us? Where are we going? To where are we being driven? Are we lost?

Our whole lives preparing – but for what? Will there be moments when we’re needed? For our particular skills? For who we are?

Probably not.

It’s about philosophical gain of function.

They want to lethalise philosophy.

 

Philosophy’s inherently comedic in our time.

 

Philosophy’s a luxury subject – for billionaires and trillionaires. Like peter Thiel.

 

You should be able to sum up your philosophy is a single gesture.

Furio, flipping the bird.

 

The analytic invasion of the bodysnatchers.

 

What happens when you complete nihilism? Do you get a trophy?

 

You could write your Cicero dialogues – like Plato’s dialogues.

 

Who the fuck reads business philosophy. What is business philosophy?

 

Philosophy itself – cancelled. Stuffed down the memory hole.

 

Am I supposed to fall in love with you, philosopher? And philosophy: am I supposed to fall in love with that?

I’m the philosopher in this relationship.

 

All we have to offer the world is high quality anguish. 100 proof.

 

The problem is, philosophy has no glamour anymore. No one will love us for the quality of our angst.

Is this the land of the dead? There’s no one here. It’s not finished yet. They haven’t moved anyone in yet. There aren’t even any delivery riders. There’s no one. Except us.

It’s like one of those ghost cities in China. That they’re just going to demolish.

I wish they’d demolish this.

Do they realise it was a mistake? Are they pleased with it?

 

Like Organisational Management Disneyworld. The O.M. imagination, in full flight. Organisational Management dreams – all fulfilled!

 

Do you think the snow will settle? This snow – it’s greasy, somehow. And it’s not really white, is it?

 

Can you read the snow? Can you read the whirling snow? You can prophesize from the flight of birds. Can you read the snowflakes? What do they say? What’s in our future? Is there a future – a real future – that isn’t just more of this? Can you see anything messianic in the snow?

 

Can you read the wind – the howling wind? What can you hear in the wind?

 

Does this count as a blizzard?

 

Will the snow soften the corners?

 

A new ice age is setting in. The grand solar minimum.

A new cold, different from the old cold. Especially demoralising. A new kind of snow. Geo-engineered snow. Kinda grey. Kinda greasy.

Geoengineered cold. To demoralise. We’re not allowed to have the sun –the winter sun.

 

We need great coats, like Dostoevsky characters.

Might as well be on Nevsky prospect. Sennayan Square.

 

Feels positively communist, this snow. Very Aleksei German.

 

Very Russian, this snow. Very Anna Karina. Very Dr Zhivago. We’re spiritual Russians right? Of course we are. We’re Russian badasses.

 

It’s a demonic cold. World-without-heart cold. The cold of a corpse world. Of a world abandoned by its sun. That’s heading comet-like into the void.

 

I’m actually getting frostbite. I’ll never type again. They’ll have to amputate my fingers.

 

I’m going to sleep in the snow. I don’t care if I die. Fuck hypothermia.

This campus wants nothing to do with the earth. It lifts itself free of the earth. Would hover above the earth, if it could.

 

Unrooted in Newcastle. Unrooted anywhere. Floating free. Adrift of the particular earth. The local earth.

 

This whole campus disavows its terroir. Is in denial of its terroir. Is trying to forget its terroir. Because everything has a terroir.

 

Don’t fuck with the earth: that’s my advice to the campus. With the earth’s depths.

 

What’s going on down there, in the depths? Before it all turns into rock?

Currents, flows.

 

The terroir ruins. It’ll turn. It’ll ruse, in spontaneous rebellion.

 

Sinkholes, opening. The Entertainment Zone, down a sinkhole. Faith Zone, swallowed up as by a Dune-sandworm.

The earth, opening to claim them.  The great chthonic maw. The devouring terroir. The chaotic terroir. The terroir of the tohu-vavohu …

 

That was a tremor – did you feel it? The Big One’s coming.

Was the campus built to withstand earthquakes? Did they expect tremors, in northeast England?

 

Can’t you hear it? It’s already begun. The process. These cracks.

 

Some geological process. Some rebellion of the earth. Some vast trembling.

 

The earth will push back. Will spring back, as after an Ice Age.

The earth will struggle up against the Organisational Management deep freeze. Against the great OM ice cube.

 

The earth, buckling. The earth, breaking.

A swallowing earthquake. An abyssal maw.

 

Do they postgraduates have anything to do with this? Is it the Bug?

Maybe vast, vast spaceships are landing. Some interdimensional disturbance.

Is it the bore gone wrong, gone wild?

Was the campus built wrong, from the start?

Some angel in the earth, beating its wings?

Maybe it’s the end of days. Maybe the roll is being called up yonder.

 

What about us – do we have an earth? We sort of Indians, sort of Brits. Where do we belong?

No one belongs anywhere. We’re strangers on the earth – that’s what Cicero would have said. The earth is just evil – it’s turned against us.