Work in Progress

Europe, the old Europe, is no more. The culture of old Europe is no more. Ring the alarm bells! Sound the klaxon! Gather and lament! Rend your garments!

Silence. Crickets.

But that’s a sign of the end: there’s no one who cares. No one who notices. It’s reaching through France, through Germany. It’ll be in Mitteleuropa soon. The subtle invasion.


Only the shadows of old Europe. Only the rumours of old Europe. Only what was once old Europe and is now no more.

Only the passing – Old Europe’s passing. Only the fall-apart. Only its breaking up, as satellites break up in orbit.


The artists of old Europe. The film directors of old Europe. The philosophers of old Europe. No more! No more!

Sound the lament! Send up the death-cry! Europe is not what it was. Europe as run out of Europe. Europe’s lost faith in itself. Europe’s lost contact with itself. It’s not what it is.


Europe’s at an end. There’s no Europe in Europe. Europe is broken up – in Europe. And have they noticed, the European philosophers? Are they aware? Are they philosophising about it now?

They can’t notice it. They can’t afford to. They live on in a state of denial. They’re pretending that things can go on as they were before. That there’s a continuity between past and present. A continuity that reaches into the future.

They’re closing their eyes to it: the death of Old Europe. They can’t think about it: the end of Old Europe. They can’t say the words, Europe is dead. They can’t take it in. They can’t experience it. They can’t admit the thought into their conscious minds. They’re repressing it in every possible way.

Of course not! they exclaim, if the thought even crosses their heads. But it cannot cross their heads. They cannot let it cross their heads. European thought is essentially extinct: European thought cannot think that.


The end of Old Europe. It’s not like the wipe out of the dinosaurs. It’s not sudden. It’s happening by degrees. Slowly, slowly.

Old Europe is demented. Old Europe is deepening its dementia. It’s gone in the teeth: who was it that said that?

They should put it out of its misery. But should they? They should shoot it dead – just hang it from the tree, like they used to hang old sheepdogs. Shoot it like a rabid dog.

Europe’s got dementia, is that it? Europe’s raving … They should turn off Europe. Cut its power. Turn off the European lights. Scatter the European stars. Europe’s dead – and is philosophy dead, too?

Analytic philosophy’s alive.

Analytic philosophy’s pseudo-alive. It’s functioning. It’s sky-netting. It’s blinking its lights. Extending its robot arms.

Analytic philosophy is calculating. Reckoning. It’s doing its technical thing. Bleeping, probably. Buzzing. Whirring. Ticking.

Analytic philosophy is scanning the sky. Waiting for its interstellar overlords. Waiting for the invasion force. For the Analytic Philosophy mothership. The Analytic Philosophy invasion force. Because that’s what it does: invade. Take over – that’s all it knows how to do.

Sending out its probes, analytic philosophy. Its drones. Scanning terrain. Working out plans of conquest. Multiplying itself. Machinating. Searching out every crevasse or crack where something else might be going on. Is this the only way European philosophy is to survive? Translated into Analytic Philosophy. Carried over into Analytic Philosophy. Transposed into Analytic Philosophy. Into Analytic Philosophy-ness.

Was there ever UK European philosophy? Was it only ever a dream? Did we dream it up, our entre academic life? Livia, and all that? Mercia? Is there a really a city called Merica, and do we live there?


The humanities can’t be seen anymore. Only out of the corner of the eye. Because they don’t matter in the new world.


It takes the humanities to diagnose what the humanities have become. It takes philosophy …

Are we the ones who understand? Us – uniquely us? The way the humanities have essentially been abandoned. Vacated. Cleared out. The way they’ve been left out in the rain. The way they’ve been packed up, ready for removal.

When will the great crash come? When, the great financial collapse? The end of the fiat currencies? The great Reckoning? When will the fall-apart come? When, the general ruination? When, the general Collapse?

We’re ready. We’re prepared. Our souls have already been hollowed out.


We’re already there! We already live in Limbo! We’re already in the afterlife! Already posthumous! The world’s already washed its hands of our kind. What we do doesn’t matter. What we are doesn’t matter.

We’re perfectly – useless. And liberated into uselessness. Freed into it, as into the sky. The sky of perfect uselessness. As good for nothings. As unproductives. As idlers in the garden of non-knowledge.


We’ve already had the lobotomy. We’ve already been turned inside out.

We died a long, long time ago. And we’re used to it. We take it for granted, our posthumous lives. We’re nothing other than posthumous. As though we’d been dead for fifty thousand years. For fifty thousand generations.


Our poor heads don’t work, and they’ve never worked. Lost in after-death clouds. In after death vagueness. There’s nothing clear about us. Noting determinate.

We’re like those people of lower than 80 IQ who will never be good for anything. Like the unborn. Like the babies who died in childbirth and float forever in Limbo.

We’re the blessed ones. We’re the unsaved and unsavable. We’re nymphs. We’re orphans. We’re the Lost Boys and Girls.

We were bashed on the head. We’re Simple. We’re Touched. We’re Foolish.

A beautiful stupidity. A gently retardation. We lag behind the world, and behind everything.

We see the campus through European eyes. We see the ruination, which the university calls world-beating success. We see the disaster, which the university calls triumph. We see the voiding, the emptying out, which the university thinks of as productivity.

We see the shadow of the university. The non-university, the un-university. We see the disastered university. Voided of itself. Of its history.


The ruination changes everything, but leaves it all intact. It’s all exactly the same as it was, but changed, utterly.


The ruins only appear as ruins when you know that they do not matter. That they’re passing away. That the form of life to which they belong, which gave them sense, is disappearing.

They’re not ruins to anyone else – true. They’re barely seen. They’re incidental. Everyone looks past them.

They’re revealed in its uselessness. Which is to say, in their ignorability. In the way that they don’t matter to anyone. Which is part of their ruination.


And our voices echoing amongst the ruins. Our stupid voices, crying out. Because we’re the children who play in the ruins. In their ruins.

Because we’ve been admitted like children into an old folk’s home – to cheer them up with our life. Our liveliness. Our stupidity. Our antics. We’re here as the entertainment. And we’re not even that entertaining anymore.

No one would see it as ruined but us.


The ruins. Do we even know what ruins are? Weren’t we brought up in the ruins? Haven’t we known nothing but ruins?


Ah, but we have a sense of who these ruins would be ruins for, that’s the thing. We keep a memory of those before us. More intelligent than us. More learned than we are. More wide-read.

We know how they’d see it, those thinkers we admire. Wouldn’t they see this as loss, as disaster?

We are their conscience, in some sense. They continue in us, even in our stupidity. Their thoughts echo in ours – in our stupidity. Their ideas sing even now in our idiocy.

And of what do they sing? Of ruination, of course. Destruction, of course. The end of the end of the end, of course.

Terrible that we should be the only ones who remember the traditions. Tragic that the memory of those thought-traditions should have fallen to us. Aberrant that we should be their legatees; that we should continue their thoughts.

Europe! We carry Europe forward in the new world! We are the memory of old Europe, of old European thought. It’s fallen to us, the undeserving. It’s been given to us, the unwarranted.

Europe! The last of Europe! The final effort of old Europe! What Europe flung ahead of itself: us!

De-volution is a thing. Dysgenics are a thing. General stuntedness. The great Diminishment. The uber Stunting.

But what makes us stand out is that we know the stuntedness. That we know the dimunition. That we are aware of the dysgenics that produced us, the likes of us.

Which is why we know the ruins as ruins. Which is why we know ourselves to be ruiners, part of the great ruination. As stranglers, even if we don’t want to be. As destroyers, even if we don’t want to be. As murderers, even if we don’t want to be.

It’s all we know how to do: destroy. Even if we think that it’s the opposite of destruction. It’s all we know how to do: murder. Even if we think we do the opposite of murder.

Even our European philosophy reverence is a form of ruination. Even our text-worship. Our throwback existentialism. Our philosophical relic hunting.


It’s fallen to us, European thought. We are the inheritors, we who cannot grasp what has passed down to us.

We introducers and contextualisers. We writers of secondary commentary. We underlings and underdogs. We fuck ups. We wrong-in-the-heads. We second-raters. Third raters. We duh-brains and dullards. We remedials. We fuckwits.


In permanent religious crisis. In permanent philosophical crisis. What we take to be religion. What we take to be philosophy. But that’s really only the collapse of philosophy. And the collapse of religion.


Best let that European world die, rather than go on like this. Better let it simply vanish, rather than preserve it as we do. Forgetting would be a better fate. Rather than ossified. Rather than frozen. Commented upon. Introduced. Contextualised. Ruiners …


The ruiners are at home in the ruins. Their ruins. The ruiners are happy with the ruination, ultimately. Except us! What’s wrong with us?


We’re just part of the ruination. Just another phase of it. We make it happen in new ways.


Livia only wanted us to fail. Success sickened her. Livia only set us up to fail. To ruin. To lay waste.


We despise what we love, even as we think we love it. We destroy it. We vandalise it.

Why did Livia want us to vandalise it?


She loved our love for European thought, Livia. She wanted to unleash it, our love – even as she knew it as destruction. She wanted our love – as ruination. Because we could only ruin what we loved. How painful it was for us! And how loving! And that’s what Livia loved: knowing that we, too, understood we could only destroy what we loved.


Let the world be interesting at least, Livia said. Let the end of the world be entertaining. Let wrong things happen rightly, and the right things happen wrongly Let there be confusion. A pell mell. Let it all unleashed. Let the end become more feverish. More febrile. More intense.

They’re acting as if, Livia’s professors, even if they don’t that their acting as if. It’s all as if European hadn’t been destroyed. They’re playing let’s pretend – even if they don’t think they’re playing let’s pretend. As if Old Europe were still Old Europe. As if the atrocity hadn’t happened. As if Abomination wasn’t rampant. As if the great hollowing hadn’t occurred.

They’re fossil Europeans. Throwback Europeans. To a time when Europe was still Europe. They haven’t grasped the European voiding. The European cavitation. They don’t get that Europe only lives on in effigy. In simulacra. And they, too, are nothing more than effigies and simulacra.


They’re part of the old European bloodstream, Livia’s professors. Pumped out from the old European heart. Still running with old European blood. As if that heart was still beating. As though Europe were still alive.

Only Livia had accepted the European death. Only she grasped it – that a new world had opened – a new non-world.

Europe! What does that word mean anymore? The Europe of thinkers and poets and artists … The Europe of the great European culture … The Europe that believed in Europe, in its thinkers, its poets, its artists … The Europe that wasn’t yet a museum … Wasn’t simply an archive … It’s gone, it’s all gone.


They thought they still lived in European time, Livia’s professors. They thought Europe still existed. That they might retire to Europe, or something. That it would still be there when they went back.

They didn’t feel the European hangover. They hadn’t grasped the European tragedy. And the fact that the tragedy that wasn’t experienced as a tragedy, which is part of the tragedy.

They didn’t understand the European disaster, Livia’s professors. Which wasn’t even suffered as a disaster, which is part of the disaster. The European catastrophe. What could it mean – when no one even knows it as catastrophe?

The last European poet is long gone. The last artist. The last novelist. The last philosopher, God knows. The last playwright. The last composer. The last, the last. There are no more European miracles left.


They didn’t understand, Livia’s professors, that the Anglo-American way of thinking has essentially conquered Europe. Has essentially destroyed it. Which is to say the organisational management way of thinking and being. And the analytic-philosophy way of thinking and being.

It’s wipe-out. It’s European Armageddon. Nothing’s strong enough. There’s nothing that can withstand it all. Nothing that can resist. The Anglo plague has been released.

It’s begun, and that means it can only play out. It’s started, which means it can only unfold, only fan out. Only spread and spread.

Germany’s fallen. France will, in time. Mitteleuropa. All the universities. The culture.


The true inheritors of European thought must understand the impossibility of inheritance. The true legatees of European ideas must grasp that there can be no legacy of European thought – not anymore.

That the chain has broken! That the line cannot hold! There’s nothing that can be passed down, and no one to receive what has been passed down. There’s a crisis of inheritance.

We’re the real inheritors – because we know ourselves to be incapable of inheritance. We’re the only legatees – because we know that we’re incapable of receiving a legacy.

We who are open to old Europe know ourselves to be essentially closed to old Europe. We who wish to inherit the thought of Old Europe know that there is nothing to inherit.

And this is our Europeanness. That we know only the nothing of Europe, the void of Europe. The fact that Europe can only be inherited as void.

Which is why idiocy is the only possible relation to the legacy of European traditions. And drunkenness. The drunken yearning to be worthy of European inheritance. That the ideas of Deleuze could be passed down to us. The thoughts of Ricoeur! Of Gadamer!


We’re the legatees of European philosophy, because we cannot be its legatees. We’re it’s caretakers, UK European philosophy, because we cannot be its caretakers. We’re its memory-keepers, because we cannot keep its memory. The ones it’s been entrusted to, because it cannot be entrusted to us. We’re the ones who will pass it down, because we cannot possibly pass it down.


Derrida’s looking up at us. Deleuze, hoping not to be disappointed. Mainlander. Hartmann. All the European jewels. All the European treasures. They’ve fallen to us! Who merely play with European jewels. Who merely toy with European treasures.


The undeserving! The thought-deficient! The ailing! The failing! The miserable! The stupid! We’re the ones to whom the baton has been passed, even though we immediately dropped the baton. We’re the ones who are supposed to carry the flame, even though we all at once extinguished the flame. It all depends on us, even as it cannot possibly depend upon us.


Soon, there will be no more UK European philosophy departments left! They’ll have closed the others down.

Except for us! Except for Merica philosophy, in the belly of the Organisational Management beast. Us! We’re the ones! We’re the elected! The last of a breed! The last outpost!

And here in the northeast, far from anywhere! As remote as the old monastic communities who kept the memory of Europe alive. And its fallen to us! We’re the inheritors! We’re the legatees! It’s been handed down to us.

Apostolic succession. Heidegger – Arendt – etc. Husserl – Gadamer – the others. And us. Us!


We’re the ones! We’re the chosens! We’re the remnant.

The really smart PhDs have gone where the money is. The power. The prestige. The smart ones have sniffed the air and fled the continental philosophy ship.

They’re betting on analytic philosophy. They’ve gone Anglo. Of course they have.

We don’t even want to kill ourselves. We don’t even … have that get out. We don’t have the sincerity to kill ourselves. We never quite mean anything.


We appal ourselves. Of course we do. We perturb ourselves.

How can we be? Something we constantly ponder. What allowed us? Our kind? What were the conditions? What went wrong with everything? Was it part of the plan? Was there really a sabotage plan, all along?


We are the things that should not be. Haven’t we always known that?

Some eruption. Some crack in being. Some aberration. Some spasm. Some shudder of the world. Some vast flinching. Of disgust. In disgust. At the very fact that we are. At the fact that the world gave birth to us.


This isn’t our … planet. This isn’t our scene. This isn’t our world. None of this means anything to us. It’s water off our ducks’ backs.

It has nothing to do with us, this reality. It’s not our fault.


We arrived late – very late. We arrived posthumously. Born with the dead. Born as the dead. Waking up, opening our eyes, into death.

The humiliation: that our minds have to be on this. That we have to think about this. That we should even be thinking of this. That we should even be talking about this. That it should even be our concern.

The humiliation: that we should be thinking about them, Organisational Management, as Organisational Management doesn’t think about us. That it should even be a concern – an issue.

The humiliation: that our minds are drawn to it, Organisational Management. Drawn back to it. As if we didn’t have anything better to think about! As if our minds shouldn’t be open to something else!

The humiliation: we’re supposed to be thinking about what matters most. Is Organisational Management what matters most?

The humiliation: it shows us what we are, our Organisational Management obsession. It reveals to us how worldly we are. How fixated upon worldly concerns we are. How we’re unable to rise above them, worldly concerns. How we’re unable to compartmentalise them, our worldly concerns. As any thinker worth their salt could do! As any real philosopher could do!

But what would we be thinking about, if not for this? What would be on our mind, if not this? What great philosophical thoughts would we be thinking?

At least it gives us an alibi, thinking about Organisational Management to the exclusion of all else. At least it hides the fact that we never really were thinking about anything profound, O.M.

We’re lucky, in a way, that we don’t have to consider our lack of ability to think anything worthwhile. To contemplate the fact that we’re not capable of pondering anything worthwhile.

But did you ever consider we might think philosophically about our predicament – about the Organisational Management move? That the move itself is actually worth thinking about – philosophically, I mean. Like, what’s the essence of Organisational Management? Is the essence of Organisational Management anything organisational? Or managerial?

Sounds like a Heideggerian question, Helmut. Have you got your Heideggerian head on?

Isn’t this exactly the kind of thing philosophy should be about: issues in the real world? About real things? About fucked up things, but real ones?

Fuck you – philosophy isn’t about the world – it’s better than the world.

It can be about the end of the world, maybe. Or about disgust with the world. But philosophy isn’t about things in the world. It’s about the world as a whole, maybe. About the world in toto.

Philosophy is not about the world. It’s about hatred of the world. You’re confusing philosophy with Gnosticism. Idiocy – philosophy is Gnosticism,. In this world. What else can it be? When everything is so disgusting. It’s all gone so bad. So rancid. It’s all so rotten.

Is it actually compulsory to hate the world?

Stop, Sophia – stop. Why are you doing this to us. It’s a given that things absolutely suck. It’ a priori that nothing should be allowed to go on as it is. That the world as run out of world. Disgust is the Grundstimmung, remember that.


It’s mutiny, Shiva. That’s probably what Livia wanted: mutiny. We have a traitor on board. A Judas. A one woman Organisational Management sleeper cell, planted in philosophy years ago. They’ve been infiltrating us for years! Years!

You’re a disgrace, Sophia. To our little pirate ship. We should make you walk the plank..


That we’re emotionally engulfed by horror. Philosophy is for suicides – for would-be suicides. If you’re not either about to kill yourself or on the brink of conversion, you’re not doing philosophy.


A sense of absolute urgency – that’s what philosophy’s about. A sense of permanent emergency. Of the total unbearableness of it all – the whole thing. The world – that’s what I’m referring to. The unbearableness of the world. The fact that it exists only as an affront. Only as a kind of insult. To us! Personally!

The world as horror – as nothing other than horror. The world as assault – and an assault on us. To be a philosophy is to be assaulted. By the world. And precisely as a philosophy. As one appalled by the world. Insulted by it! Injured but it! Humiliated by it! In permanent humiliation!

And what if the Organisational Management move helps cultivate it, this hatred. What if Organisational Management is the best possible place for philosophy. Keeping us on permanent tenterhooks. Making sure that we’re always on our toes.

It’s about stoking the fire of philosophical angst, that’s the thing. We need to feel the fragility of our thought-place. That our right to think could be revoked at any moment! That we’re undergrounders. Misunderstood. Unanswerable to foreign powers.

Maybe this is about what all our philosophy has been for: this moment. The O.M. moment. Philosophy is about to come into its own. We’re about to come into our own. We’ll reveal ourselves as the superheroes of philosophy. With special powers.

With special needs. Face it: we’re fuck ups. We’re deficient. There are things wrong with us – major things. We need, like, immediate therapy.

We were being prepared for his. Livia brought us here for this. This was her purpose. her higher purpose.


Maybe Organisational Management is only a training. This is a kind of obstacle course for philosophers, for would-be philosophers (and all philosophers are would be philosophers. No one I ever simply a philosopher. Philosophy is only ever about yearning – and the yearning to be a philosopher.) Maybe we have a higher purpose.

What higher purpose?

Livia wanted to train us up, prepare us, for some war. A war against reality itself. A war against the world – this world – what it’s become. This is part of her Gnostic ruse.

Cunning.

Sure, it’s cunning. Livia was cunning.

Don’t speak about her in the past tense.


Maybe it’s like Karate Kid, or something. We’re being trained.

What for?

Aliens. It’s got to be aliens.

Organisational Management aliens?

Or fallen angels – don’t forget fallen angels.

Don’t start with your Book of Enoch shit. Don’t start with your fallen angels.


Is there any Hindu hope, Shiva? What do they many Hindu gods have to say about it all? Is there a god of humiliation? Of compromise? How many heads do they have? How many arms?


The thing to remember is that we’re dead. That the philosophy is already dead, in our world. That we’ve already been destroyed.

Even the crap philosopher?

Even the crap philosopher.


We’re not part of this. Except possibly Sophia. It’s not our battle.

Oh it is.

They’ve already won. We’ve already lost. We’ve already conceded victory. Theirs are the spoils – because we don’t want the soils. Theirs is the victory over the world. What do we care.

 Oh, we care. Oh we do!

The importance of drinking. Of drunken self-confidence. Of drunken be-who-you-are.

Let us become these drunkards, these unashameds. Let us become these cosmic drinkers, unafraid. Unabashed!

Let us become the barbarians we are. An affirm it: our barbarianhood. Let us come into our barabarianism. Our inner intellectual Visigoths. Our philosophical Ostrogoths!


No why to our drinking. The explosion of whys. And wherefores.

We drink because … there is no why. Drinking has no why. It’s not about the why.

The drunken question – that’s what we want to hear. The question we can only ask when drunk. That can only sing through our drunkenness. Exalting our drunkenness. Lifting it higher.

The drunk before the sky. The drunk, under heaven. A kind of holy drinking – and a holy drinker. A toast to the night. To the lightning. To the fire of the stars.

Let’s never be sober again.


A great alcoholic influx. Into our veins! Into our bloodstream! The swelling of a mighty alcoholic river. That carries us away!

And don’t we want to be carried away! Don’t we want it to be carried away: our mediocrity! Our Britishness! Our inner organisers! And managers! Our inner analytic philosophers!


Idiocy’s song is a drunken song. The drunkard sings of idiocy and sings idiocy. Our idiot cries! Our drunken cries!


Is there a drunken god to which we cry? Is There a Dionysus in our sky? A wine god? A Bacchus for our revels? To whom we direct our drunken prayers? To whom we pour our drunken libations?


Our drunken sacrifice – of philosophy. Of all philosophical sense. Of all reasonableness. Of all measuredness. Drinking is the sacrifice of analytic philosophy. Of the analytic philosophers inside us. Of calm, measured sober philosophy. Of philosophical tranquillity. Of philosophical peace.


We’re waking up our philosophical neighbours. We being raucous – philosophically raucous. Unreason, unleashed. Passions, unleashed. The drunken attunement: unto what does it open us? What does it let us declare? What are we attuned to?


The drunken earth and drunken sky. The drunken stars in the drunken night. The whole world as drunk, and the earth as drunk. We see it all: the world’s inner drunkenness. The world’s drunken song. Its bacchanial revels.


Is there a drunken wisdom? Are there drunken profounds? Drunken fundaments? Are there drunken philosophies – philosophies that you understand when you’re drunk?

 Or is drinking only ever the ruin of philosophy? The sacrifice of philosophy? Of philosophical reason? Of the philosophical logos?


To liquefy philosophy. To render it fluid. Fluent – in another tongue. Tbe carried away by drink.

The philosopher torn apart in the drunken flood. The philosopher-Orpheus, singing in his pieces.

Let us be these drunkards. Let us drink ourselves to death – to the death of the philosopher inside us. And let us philosophise from this drunken death, this drunken dying.


Our bloodshot eyes! Our wine stained teeth! Catching alcoholic cancers of the mouth and throat!

We’re drinking ourselves to death and beyond death. We’re drinking-dying, which is better than sober-dying. We’re drinking endlessly during the endless end.

We’re dosing – not even micro dosing. We’re macro dosing. Overdosing. As the world becomes more unbearable …


Our drunken fantasia. Our inebriation … Our incapacity … the impossibility of thinking. Of living. Of being alive.

No more living in this world. No more accepting it – this world. No more, it’s terms and conditions – this world. We’re tearing up the contract – the social contract.


We’re antinomian in drink.

We’re the drunken Alcibiades, not sober old Socrates. We’re drunken Cynics.


Were there ever drunken schools of philosophy? But drunks are always philosophers. Drunkards always have a theory of it All. Something momentous to impart.

Drunkards think of themselves as being on the brink. As bringing the drunken good news. The drunken gospel.

There is such a thing as a drunken messianism. As the feeling of an imminent world shift. Of drunken prophecy. The drunk is a prophet. But of what world. Of what world cataclysm.

The drunk KNOWS. A spurious knowledge. A dubious knowledge. A distorted knowledge. A know nothing knowledge. An idiot’s knowledge, which is to say a non-knowledge. But a knowledge nonetheless.


Drunk in the world’s night … Drunk in the age of the world picture … Drunk in the technate …

*Drunken assurance. Drunken confidence. A drunken mission.

We drink to forget stupidity. We drink to consummate our idiocy. To think that idiocy is enough. That it will take us to where we need to go.

To sail away on our drunkenness. On our drunken boat. Over the drunken waves. Under the drunken stars. Full of our drunks’ song. Full of our drunken lament. Our drunken cry.

And our drunken souls will sing upwards. Our drunken cries. We’ll drink all the way to second innocence. We’ll forget all the enchantments. All the songs of experience.

A second childhood, in drunkenness. We’ll be children again, but drunken children, in the world’s morning.

Our good fortune: the barrier of idiocy is always raised against the idiot. We never really know how stupid we are.


There’s a song of idiocy. A forlorn song. That is of half knowing one’s idiocy – the curse of one’s idiocy. The tragedy of it. And the tragedy of knowing that one doe not know and cannot know one’s idiocy. That idiocy can never think beyond idiocy, encompassing it. That the idiot can never think from the other side of idiocy.


The finitude of idiocy. Idiocy’s limitations. The poor dull eyes of the idiot, locked into their idiocy. The poor idiot’s brain, which can only think so much.

Unless idiocy is also a kind of insulation. Unless idiocy actually protects you from knowing the truth – the terrible truth. Unless idiocy is a version of a protective coma, into which the body sends you when reality becomes too much. Unless idiocy is a shield, a carapace, which prevents the total collapse that the real philosopher would feel.


We’re protected. Idiocy protects us. Holds it to its bosom. Keeps us out of total danger. Total exposure. Which is why we’ve kept our sanity, such as it is. Which is why we it hasn’t led us into the fate of Hölderlin, of Nietzsche.

We’re lucky, in a way. Idiocy keeps us as at distance from it, the truth. Idiot says its protective spell over us. Idiocy keeps us alive. Idiocy is a thought-helmet. A thought cage, like a shark cage. Idiocy is the bathysphere that protects us in the deepest depths.


The idiot always stands in their own way. Idiocy blocks the idiot. It’s their original sin. It’s what idiocy can’t get past.

*A banal idiocy: that’s what has to be avoided. A complacent idiocy. Idiocy should always struggle against idiocy, Livia said. Idiocy should be in mortal combat with idiocy.

*A workaday idiocy. An idiocy content to go about in idiocy. Never that!

Idiocy must suffer itself, that’s the thing. It must suffer its idiocy. Must find itself unbearable, its idiocy. Idiocy must despise idiocy, the very stuff from which it’s made. Which means that it wants only to become something other than idiocy. Even as it’s condemned to idiocy, and to nothing other than idiocy.


The idiocy plunge. Like an ice-bath for her, for Livia. Refreshing, in its way. Enlivening. The splash of water on the face. There she was, figuratively diving with idiocy, just as you might dive with dolphins. Enjoyable, in its way. Enlivening, for an old non idiot like her.


The innocence of idiocy is too be enjoyed. Idiocy, disporting: a fine sight. Idiocy at play, like dolphins at play. Idiocy, leaping up to the height of idiocy. Trying to break the surface of idiocy, with its idiot leaps. And failing to do so – failing to break the surface. But failing charmingly. Laughingly. Which provokes laughter in turn. Joyful laughter. Idiots do the funniest things, right?


The idiocy-spring. The idiocy-origin. Fresh from it. Sparking with it.

The innocence of idiocy. Idiocy, fresh from the idiotsprung, as Livia called it. From the origin of idiocy.


You can savour it, idiocy. Sip at it.

Idiocy nectar. The honey of idiocy, slipping down the throat.


The idiocy sparkle. The nothing-but-idiocy.

Idiocy’s dance. Idiocy’s joy. As it comes into itself. As it returns to itself. As it takes it leaps – its idiocy leaps. As it cries out in idiot-exaltation. In idiot joy. In its idiot simplicity. Its idiot-innocence …


There are times when idiocy need not suffer itself. When idiocy is relieved from despising itself. When idiocy plays. Disports. When idiocy larks about.

Idiocy’s skylarking. Idiocy’s frigging in the rigging of life. Idiocy’s cavorting. Idiocy’s clambering over itself …


Idiocy, among the idiots. Idiocy, between the idiots.

Idiots’ banter. Idiocy’s to-and-fro.

The idiocy pell mell. The idiocy chaos.

Idiocy, swarming. Overspilling. Idiocy frothing. And frothing over! Idiocy, foaming. idiocy’s bubbles, popping under the idiocy’s sun.

Idiocy’s champagne …


Idiot’s outside, always outside. Under the idiot sky, the idiot stars, the idiot sun, the idiot moon. Idiocy, on the idiot earth.


The idiot-leap. Out of idiocy? No: into idiocy.

Idiocy can never beak out of idiocy. Transcend idiocy.

Idiocy’s only ever a deepening of idiocy.


Idiocy’s increase. Idiocy’s pressure.

The density of idiocy. Idiocy gathering and loosening. Idiocy hardening, clotting. And idiocy loosening again. Finding its flow. Becoming liquid. Deliquescing.