Work in Progress

You’re not going to forget, are you?

Forget what?

You and me.

This isn’t going to just disappear.

This afternoon … And all the other afternoons … I hate the idea that this could be forgotten.

I’ll remember.

Write it down in your notebook. Write something about me. Actually, I should write something in your notebooks – your sacred notebooks. Let me jot something down. Draw some picture. Leave my O.M. mark.

 

I don’t want to be lost in time or to time or whatever. I want someone to remember – this – even if I don’t. Will I remember this moment, philosopher? Or this one? It all fades away doesn’t it? Soon there’ll be no one to remember anything.

 

And it won’t even matter that you write it down. Because no one will read it. Everyone will have forgotten how to read.

 

Must be sad for you that no one reads anymore. All this is a dying art.

And these books. What’s going to happen to them? Landfill, probably – which is sad. You can’t pass your books to anyone now. No one will want them. No one will know what to do with them.

Not even suicide. We’re not even capable of that. Not even parasuicide, for fuck’s sake.

Not even anything. We’re simply alive. We’re still alive. And we’re actually healthy. Well, quite healthy.

Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong with everything. I know that. I see that.

I don’t know how to say it. Could philosophy help me? Is that what philosophy’s about: what’s wrong?

 

Something’s wrong. I don’t know what it is. It’s just an … intuition, really. It’s just a feeling. But maybe feelings shouldn’t be so easily dismissed. Do you feel it, too?  Maybe you do more than feel it.

Can philosophy help? What can philosophy tell me?

 

The sense that everything’s wrong. How to articulate it, this everything is wrong? How to say it: everything is wrong?

What is it, this everything? What could it be? Everything – the whole. The entirety.

 

Everything … how can you talk of everything? Isn’t it a bit much, talking of everything? Isn’t it too … immodest?

It shouldn’t be allowed. It’s too much. What does it mean to say that everything’s wrong? Who could possibly say that?

Is there something wrong with us – or right with us? Are we lacking something, or have we found something? Is there something missing, in our lives? Or have we found something that’s more than life.

 

Are we scholars because we hate life? Because we’ve been driven inwards from life? Introverts. Or is it because we’ve discovered something? Something better than life?

 

What’s wrong with us? What’s so very wrong? Do other people feel this wrong, too? Is it only us? Like there’s something wrong with our existence. No – like our existence itself is fundamentally wrong.

What’s the opposite of election? Being cursed, maybe. Is that what we are – cursed? Damned? Who damned us? Who selected us to be damned? What’s so special about us? Nothing special. There’s nothing special about our fuckedupness either.

Drinking – we have to get drunk. That’s what Cicero would have wanted. We have to get drunk in memory of her.

She wanted us drunk. Drunk, we’ll be able to discern what we have to do.

 

Do we drink because we’re stupid or are we stupid because we drink?

 

Cicero used to talk about the perfection of idiocy. A drunken perfection. What did she mean by that?

 

We have to drink our way out of this. Drink until we can seize upon it – everything. Until we can think about everything. Until we can think the thought: everything’s wrong.

And once you reach that point. One you can say that …

Then what?

Drinking. What Cicero wanted. The clue was in our drunkenness. The clue was our drunkenness.

 

What happened when we drank. What possessed us. What spoke through us. What lifted us.

 

The labyrinth of our idiocy. In which we had been lost. In which we had been mired. And from which we were lifted in drunkenness.

 

Our idiocy caught fire: was that it?

 

Our drunken apotheosis. Our drunken apocalypticism. Drunken messianism. Drunken messianic hope. Hope for what? That it can end, the endlessness. That it can be brought to an end, the fake eternity.

 

Our drunken death blow. That we will strike. The fall of the axe from the sky. The guillotine blade cleaving the air. The certainty of death.

 

The drunken chance. The drunken lifting.

We were not lost. We could see it, the whole sky. It was before us, all of it: The true sky.

could see it: the eye of God. The absent eye of the absent of God. The void – was that it? Was that the name for it?

The DIVINE absence: that’s what we saw. The divine NOTHING, all in capitals.

 

We’d reached the right level of intensity. Reached the right kind of acceleration. Attained some kind of takeoff. Ardency caught fire.

But it fades, right?

Sure it fades. There’s the next day. There’s the hangover.

Of course there is.

Why do we have to forget all over again? Why do we have to fall back? Why do we have to fail?

Finitude, baby.

 

Why drunkenness be permanent? Why can’t we always live at that level? Why can’t we stay the drunken course?

Why do we have to go on? Why does there have to be a tomorrow? Why another day? Why does it just go on? Why the day after day? Why the sequel? Why the endless fallaway? When we can’t even retain what happened. When can’t hold onto it anymore.

It’s, like, the Organisational Management ice fortress.

 

When will be defrosted? Unthawed?

 

It’s not even a hunker-down winter. A Scando-hygge winter. That might be mitigated by candles and general cosiness.

 

It’s the off season of the universe. The great zero-summer.

 

This is the winter of snapped off icicles. Of ice-shards. Of winter in the blood. Of ice-chunks in the blood. This is the winter of the wind howl. The world howl.

 

Was that a wolf howl? Are there wolves on campus? Dire wolves? Sabre toothed tigers?

 

Where’s this wind blowing from? What’s it bringing with it, this wind?

There’s no defence against it. No place to hide. No corner you can turn to escape it.

 

The wind, channelled through the campus. Roaring through it.

 

Climate has changed. There’ll never be another summer. This is it. The climate reset.

This is the beginning of the new ice age.

 

It’s eternal winter. It’s nuclear winter. Nothing will grow, ever again.

Oh things will grow – twisted things, mutated things. Maybe even interesting things.

 

Ice sheets, lain over the university: that’s the future. The academy in the deep freeze.

Glaciers, rolling through the campuses.

 

The Campus is causing the weather. I’m sure of it. Some O.M. tech.

No – it’s Organisational Management itself. It’s utter intellectual aridity. It’s the frozenness of the soul.

Organisational Management’s changing the climate. The climate of the academe. The climate of the world.

 

The Organisational Management ice spear – thrown through our souls. Plunging through us.

 

What happens when the brain freezes – when it just freezes? Will we be able to think anymore? Will our brains work?

 

This is a new dimension of cold. It’s, like, ultra-numbness. Like a dead leg. But a dead body. A dead head.

 

The cold is a programming. It’s part of the whole thing. The cold is at work – it’s part of the whole operation. The general entrainment.

 

Is this the new ice age? Has it returned? Are the ice sheets coming south?

 

Are there ice mirages, like desert mirages? What do you see?

Nothing but the campus.

Maybe the campus is a mirage. A bad dream.

Did cold dream of Organisational Management, or did Organisational Management dream of the cold?

 

This is a special cold. It’s supposed to reach your bones. An ontological cold. It doesn’t obey the usual laws. It’s supposed to demoralise you.

 

Think summer thoughts, postgraduates! Think of the great summer conferences! Think of the campus in summer: think of the sward of green grass outside the café. Think of summer walks on the Town Moor. Think of summer trips to Longsands! To Whitley Bay beach!  

Think the summers of your distant childhoods! Think summer school holidays! Think of beach time ‘neath the summer vault!

This is a new phase of our wine tasting. It’s, like, esoteric wine. Wine that isn’t obvious. It’s a complement to us that she’d move us on to this. That she’d think we were ready for this.

Complement!? Fuck, you have some version of Stockholm syndrome.

It’s a joke. It’s a trick. She’s waiting to see whether we have the courage to see through it. To just say, it’s shit!

Well, do we?

 

Nothing happened by accident, with Cicero – you know that. Everything was planned, even if it didn’t seem like a plan. It was her Eastern Europeanness planning. It was her behind the iron curtain ways.

The iron curtain fell long ago.

Not in Cicero’s head. You had to think ahead. Of the authorities! Of the apparatchiks! It was a question of survival, over there. And over here!  Everything had to be planned.

 

Anyway – the wine.

The wine! What did she want us to taste.

She wanted us to be revolted, maybe. To spit it out. To reject the wine – just like she said we should reject the world. She wanted us to be disgusted in general, didn’t she? Like, viscerally. To viscerally reject everything – the whole world. Everything that existed.

 She wanted us to know what was better than being – otherwise than being.

What did she mean by that?

Something very Jewish. Deeply Jewish. And deeply Eastern European.

It was to do with the Jewish Law.

The Jewish Law is about disgust?

About what comes from elsewhere. Opening beyond the world. All the natural cycles. Like, transcendence. Antinomianism.

Didn’t she call herself a Gnostic? I’m confused.

Sure – a Jewish Gnostic.

But back to the wine … So she wanted us disgusted, and she disgusted us. With wine.

Exactly.

Our idiocy belongs to it, Old Europe. Our idiocy comes from it.

What the young lack today is a sense of idiocy. They don’t know what they lack. What they don’t possess.

They don’t mourn it, Old Europe. They don’t ache for it. They don’t lament that it lies in ashes, Old Europe. That it’s been destroyed, old Europe.  That its wines run with poison now. That its philosophy is likewise poisoned.

No one knows but us. And the mode of our knowledge is idiocy.

 

Old Europe: that’s what we measure ourselves against. And the thinkers of Old Europe. And the writers of Old Europe.

It’s old Europe that makes us feel our idiocy. That lets us know it. Compared to them, the gods of Old Europe, who are we? Insignificants. Count-for-nothings.

 

There is no Europe, not anymore. Oh there’s pastiche Europe. Museum Europe. But no actual Europe.

No more old European masterpieces. No more master signatures. No more world-bestriders.

The time of Thought is gone. The time of Theory.

 

The end of Europe. We had grasped it instinctively, Cicero knew. We could feel it, even in Newcastle. Even at this distance.

We knew we were reading the last books of Old Europe. And that we were the last readers of the books of Old Europe. That it was only eschatology from now on, when it came to Old Europe.

 

The new European nothing. The new European absence. Only a negative theology could explain it.

Only an apophatics might help. We can only speak of what Old Europe is not. Of the thought that isn’t happening.

 

Nothing new under the old European sun. No new recipes. Only the same old stirring of the European pot.

 

The European texts are relics now.

 

No one’s singing those old European songs. No one’s ascending the Old European peaks.

 

Not even European nihilism. Not event the uncanniest guest standing by the door. Not even the European uncanny. The magic’s gone. The spell doesn’t work. The European incantations.

 

God is dead. And so is European Philosophy. So is European culture. It’s essentially dead. Nothing more can be expected.

 

Do not expect any more European geniuses. No European genius is coming to help you now.

 

The European desert is growing. The European cry is no longer to be heard. The European names are gradually being forgotten.

 

Will European philosophy be born again in Newcastle? Cicero mused. Of course not! It’s not a question of that. But it will be honoured here – by our dishonour. Tribute will be paid – by our lack of tribute. By our drunken European philosopher impressions.

 

Europe is dead and we have killed it, Cicero said. Europe’s blood foaming on our blade.

We’d essentially run Europe through. When the European philosophers actually read the secondary work written about them. When they saw what had been made of their thought – what we had done to it …!

 

What we do to philosophy over here. How we destroy it, philosophy, in our special way over here.

What happened to European thought? Who killed European thought? Was it us?

Did European thought have to contemplate what it had made in the UK? Did it have to face its Anglophone legacy? Did it have to see what we had made of their thought? What we had put their thought through?

 

European finalism. The European dead end. The European Not.

 

The Channel doesn’t exist – not anymore. There’s no distance. There’s no gap. There’s no void between us and Europe. Europe is part of our world now.

 

European atrophy. The withering of European thought-limbs. The European weakening.

 She wanted us repelled by the world – by the entire order of the nature. It was all about disgust – utter disgust. Disgust: that’s the lesson. We have to be disgusted with everything.

We are disgusted with everything, pretty much.

Not enough! We have to become more disgusted.

The postgraduates are retching – is that a good sign?

Definitely!

 

This wine is a transition. It’s a threshold. Over which we have to cross.

And what’s on the other side? Like, good wine?

 

It’s something to do with Europe, too. These are European wines. Grown in European soil. In the European terroir.

They’re still disgusting.

Is she saying something – that Europe’s disgusting? That Europe should disgust us? She knew how infatuated we were with European thought. Was she saying we should leave it behind? Or is it that the soil has changed, somehow. That the terroir’s gone rotten.

Why’s it gone rotten?

 

We don’t see any of those great European thinkers anymore, do we? Those bestriding the world like colossi types.

Some of them are still alive. Some of the greats.

But they’ve outlived their time. They know it. This is the age oif ashes – that’s what they know. May 68 and all that’s long gone.

And the ashes are in the soil. And in the vines. And in the grapes. And in the wine. Is that it?

 

Cicero would love this: us sitting around, pondering her so-called message. Trying to figure things out as we drink her disgusting wine. As we, like, pondering the mystery of its disgustingness very seriously. She’d think this was very fucking funny. You guys are even more idiotic than I thought you were, she’d say.

 

I think she wants us to digest the wine, not retch it up. She wants us to convert the poison, somehow. Through some internal process.

Isn’t that what Socrates did with alcohol? He could drink all night, but it wouldn’t touch him. All the other drinkers would, like, have collapsed around him, but he’d just head out to the marketplace in the morning, as usual.

Yeah, but he didn’t convert the wine. He controlled its effects. Using reason.

Temperance – that’s the virtue, isn’t it? The mean between puritanism and drunkenness, Aristotle would call it.

Cicero hated temperance. The palace of wisdom leads to the palace of wisdom, and so on. Fuck reason.

 

Wine’s part of Jewish rituals, right? It’s in the psalms as cheering the hearts of men or whatever. And it it’s in the Song of Songs as, like, a good thing. And they poured out wine as a libation offering in the temple, right? Which means God likes drinking wine, too. You drink it during Passover. It’s about the joy of deliverance.

Yeah, but when Noah got drunk he got all incest-y …

 

And for Christians? Jesus turned water into wine, right? At that wedding? And wine’s a symbol of his blood, right? It’s about his sacrifice. Drink this in memory of me, and all that. And didn’t he call himself the true vine?

But this isn’t good wine. You wouldn’t Jesus to turn water into this. It’s not, like, good stuff from the earth. About the earth’s bounty, or anything.

Because the earth isn’t good anymore – that’s what Cicero’s saying. By your fruits you shall know it. The earth sucks, so its fruit sucks.

And blows.

 

It’s bubbling. Like when you stick phosphorous in water.

 

I can actually hear this wine. Is that supposed to happen?

 

This wine’s got its own microclimate. This wine’s positively balmy.

 

Socrates could drink, like, infinite wine and not get drunk.