Work in Progress

Why is everything so everything?

There’s just more and more and more and still no sense.

Earth is the hell of some unknown planet: who was it that said that?

This world without shadows. This overlit world. This overdeveloped world.

This transparent world – that’s only ever itself. This tautologous world. The same and the same same.

That knows only how to be itself. That’s never interrupted. That’s without … absence.

This is what they’ve made. This is what they’ve done. This is their crime, that pretends that it’s not a crime.

They stopped the world doing anything but appear.

 

This humourless world, though it laughs. This world without laughter, though it smiles.

This serious world. This weighing upon us world. This crushing us world. This impossible world.

Europe’s dead. Even the death of Europe’s dead. There’s no sign of it: the death of Europe. The new Europe doesn’t mark its grave.

But the old vines remember it. The oldest vines know the truth: the death of Europe.

 

These vines – the last old wines. The last of old Europe.

They’ve actually gone off.

Yeah, but it’s a good off. A honest off. Anyway, a very very good wine is actually indistinguishable from a very very bad one.

Is that right?

I made it up. It’s the sort of thing Cicero would have said.

Can we just pour away the wine – do we have to drink it?

We have to. Something will happen.

This is the taste of European nihilism.

We’re drinking the corpse of Old Europe. We’re drinking Old Europe, rotting in the barrel.

 

Eastern European doom has lifted. The aftermath of years of capitalism. They’re not day drinkers anymore. They’re not entirely alienated. They’re not natural Gnostics. There’s no energy of despair.

 

Even Eastern Europe’s all compulsory positivity now. Even Eastern Europe is all yes I can.

 

Their atheism isn’t spiritual. It doesn’t have depth. It isn’t a kind of negative theology.

Their nihilism isn’t religious. The absence of God isn’t present to them. Isn’t tangible. Isn’t thick.

 

Cicero knew what Europe had become. She saw it coming. She’d lost the European faith early.

Europe is dead. It had outlived its time. It’s essentially posthumous. It’s stinking up the place.

Newcastle Philosophy: this is where European philosophy has beached itself. Had flopped ashore. There it was: the great whale, lying there. Regarding us, with its great European eye. Flapping its useless European fins.

 

We need to weaponize our euro-angst. Beam it up to Mother. Upload it, like they uploaded that computer virus in Independence Day. Destroy the whole thing.

 

We need to fight back.

We need to summon all the European pathos. The ur-moods. The euro-gloom. The stuff you find in ponderous arthouse films.

Let Mother contemplate it. Let her take it in.

We need to summon up our misery. And the terroir of our misery. The old Europe of our dreams.

 

The European water’s poisoned, Cicero always said. There’s nothing to draw up from the European well.

There’s only rotting now. Only putrefaction. Only the mulch of the long dead. Only the great European compost heap, with its useless books, that no one reads anymore.

 

Eastern Europe is no longer the treasury of doom, Cicero said. They’re no longer net doom exporters.

The UK will have to produce its own doom.

 

No one makes ponderous arthouse films anymore, Cicero said. Nothing interesting is growing from the Eastern European soil. Let alone the western European soil.

 

Our imitation European drunkenness. Our ersatz European angst.

Europe’s last gasp. Europe’s last message.

Not an S.O.S. – what? Europe’s last … what? Plea? Prayer?

 

Were we French in a previous life? Were we German? What attracted us to European things?

 

Our European idiocy. The European flavour to our idiocy. We speak from our idiocy in a European way.

 

Our angst is European angst. Our twistedness is a European twistedness. It’s as though we’d been given European hearts. As though we’d had a European faecal transplant.

 

What has Europe become in us? What has European philosophy become? What unexpected flowering had happened at its very end? In its final hour?

 

The last light from Europe. A last European refulgence.

 

Europe has been poisoned, too. And the only philosophy must be a philosophy of poison. A philosophy that has grown from poison, and lets poison philosophise.

A diminished philosophy. A stunted philosophy. But an honest philosophy because it dwelt on its condition. Or issued from its conditions.

 

The lights of Europe are going out.

 

There’s thunder in the European mountains.

 

We weep European tears, in our European idiocy.

Our European souls are crying.

These alien imports. Foreign to us. Meaningless to us. Connected to us by nothing. That arrived from elsewhere

These books in translation that crashed down to us like meteors, still hot. Still sizzling. Into our benighted country!

High French seriousness: what could we have to do with that? High German solemnity. Whole oeuvres in fifty volumes … More … Entire lives spent writing …

But that’s all gone now.

 

Seared by thought. Marked by it. Even us.

 

We felt the decline. We knew our fall. We knew that philosophy was essentially above us. Out of reach. That the past could not be ours.

The old assurance, the old intelligence, the old languages, the old ability to read, the old linguistic capacities: none of this could be ours.

 

We loved a world that’s disappeared. That was disappearing.

 

We could foresee what it would become in the UK, European philosophy. What would be made of it in English departments! In Modern languages departments!

 

Perhaps the European philosophy in us knew more than we did. Perhaps philosophy spoke after all. And we weren’t complete idiots.

Perhaps something of the European traditions awakened in us. Used us. Thought through us – despite us.

 

Didn’t we turn European philosophy into sheer irrationalism? Perhaps. Probably.

We were answering back to our Englishness. Struggling with it. recruiting the whole of European philosophy into our self-struggle.

The Bug will end our timeline. Just snip it off as a wrong turn – as an aberration – as a mistake.

And then what?

The nothing. This world will end.

 

Some say the Bug’s the agent of destruction for the Good. A divine attack dog.

 

The paragraduates want to contact the Bug. Convince it to intervene in our world. To demolish the campus.

What have the paragraduates got against the campus?

The same as we do.

 

They want to harness the Bug to destroy the campus.

How?

By controlling the bore. Undermining the foundations.

Complicated.

So why did she move us to Organisational Management?

Because we needed something to struggle against. So there’s a charge. A build up of … polarities. Opposites: that was her word – you know that. It was about her dialectics.

 

Cicero loved us – did you know that? She actually loved us.

She loved you.

Cicero and I had our affair-lette. But she talked of you guys constantly.

She wanted to start some revolution. The lightning was supposed to set fire to the world, or whatever.

Sure … the lightning.

 

Your enigmatic beauty, Kitten. Even Cicero was stirred by your enigmatic beauty. You could almost have been European, she said. That is, until you opened your mouth.

 

You always gave a very good impression of intelligence, Kitten: that’s what Cicero said. Who knew, you might actually be intelligent.

The lightning was love. Did you ever hear her talking about that?

Love? What a way to talk about love …

Do you remember what Wittgenstein said on his deathbed: ‘Tell them I lived a wonderful life’. We have lived wonderful lives, haven’t we? The last readers. The last kind-of readers. Who have a memory of what books once were. Of what reading once was …

We’re glad we lived, aren’t we? Maybe not glad we’re alive, but glad we lived. And that we read all these things. All those authors, all those books: what they’ve meant to us! And their vanished worlds. Worlds in which people read. Worlds where books were important.

And the melancholic knowledge that our world, too, will vanish. And that no one will remember this time, when we could still remember a time when people actually read.

Unless you write your book, Shiva. Unless you save us all in your memory. To you and your book falls the burden of resurrecting all this. Afternoons like this. Days like this, which don’t mean anything. Which are of no importance.

 

For a time, we were allowed to play at being academics, that’s all. For a time, by some miracle, we slipped through – got jobs. But that was only keen to no one was watching … When there were no guards on the gate …