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.
We wanted to have faith. For there to have been conditions for faith. For hope to have been legitimate hope. We wanted our paths to have led somewhere. For it not have been random. For us not to just have been lost. Wayward. We wanted for there to have been a path – all along. A true path. A place we were going.
We wanted wine to lead to wine. For there to have been a wine path. For wine to have led to wine. A descent that was also an ascent. A climbing. A road upwards.
We want to have been educated – edified. Led upwards by Cicero.
For us to have been savants, after all. For genius to have been hidden in our stupidity. For dawn to open in our midnight. For our dead end to be a new beginning.
We wanted an eschatology of wine. Of disgustingness. Where each step downwards was also a step upwards. Where we were never simply sinking.
For the disgusting not to be merely disgusting. For the disgusting to have hidden something. For the disgusting to be delicious.
That nothing had happened by chance. That chance could become fate. That there was an Order after all. That there was meaning after all.
That the contingent wasn’t contingent after all. That Necessity was playing its hand. Fate.
That it wasn’t all Wrong. That we hadn’t been blind. That we followed a path. That we were being watched. Monitored. Assessed. It was a trial.
That our fall wasn’t really a fall. That our plunge … Our descent … was really an ascent.
That we were the Chosen, after all. That we’d kept loyal – to whatever it was …
That Cicero was lifting us up. That the sun was breaking through the clouds. Great words were being spoken. That Cicero was an angel, after all. That Cicero was spreading great wings. That Cicero was singing her great song.
That Cicero had seen, watched, remembered. That none of it was going to be lost. That she’d gathered up all our crumbs. That justice would be done.
Cicero’s messianism. Even in her anti-messianism. Even in her Gnosticism. Even in her denial of the grounds of hope.
Even in Cicero’s turning away from us. Even in her spurning of us. Even in her apparent indifference to us. There, too, was a sign of love. And even of her love. Even of what she wanted for us.
The leader is only ever a messiah. To be led is only ever an exodus. It’s always a matter of the Promised Land.
We’re developing a wine belief. Isn’t that something? That we’re ascending a wine-ladder.
We believe in wine-meaning. In an eschatology of wine. We really think it’s going to make sense – in the last bottle. That it will all come together at the end.
We believe in Cicero, in other words. We want to believe in Cicero.
A wine pattern. That’s desperate!
We are desperate. We want to find meaning in all things. We want to find the delicious in the disgusting. We can’t believe in the disgusting. Which is why we’re missing Cicero’s most fundamental lesson.
We want to have had a leader – of course. Even an ambiguous leader. Even a misleading leader.
We’ve wanted to be led – all along. We wanted Cicero to have been guiding us.
We wanted there to have been a Cicero path. That she’d laid out for us, step by step. A yellow brick road – why not?
We want to be led – of course we do. We wanted someone to have been in charge. For none of this – none of what’s happened – to have been by chance. We wanted to be part of the unfolding of fate.
To have trusted in Cicero – that’s what we wanted. To have been right in trusting her. To have followed her cue. Her clues. The path she left us. To have been good little boys and girls.
Authority – that’s what we wanted to see. To trust someone. To believe that someone had the answers. That we weren’t just duped. That it was leading somewhere, all of it. That we weren’t just on a hiding to nothing.
That it wasn’t all about a pile of crappy old wines that Cicero didn’t want to take wherever she was going!
A greater Meaning – is that what we wanted?
We still believed that there was an antidote to nihilism. That this wasn’t nihilism’s wine. That this wasn’t nihilism’s campus – not entirely.
Were we credulous? Were we just like all the other fools, looking for some new religion? Wanting some maharishi, or whatever. Someone to tell us that it all made sense …
Was there something wrong with us? A pathetic dependency. Were we meaning-cravers? Meaning-beggars?
We yearn for meaning. Our hearts beat for meaning. We call out for meaning in the world’s night. Meaning in wine, and in disgusting wine. As if the disgusting should itself be meaningful. As if errancy were truth.
The wine was a reminder. Not to trust the world. Not to take comfort in the world. Not to seek out meaning in the world.
Which meant the meaningful lay in the meaningless – in the disgusting. In relation to the meaningless. Meaning was to be found even where there was emphatically no meaning. When there was even anti-meaning. Anti-wine.
Victory in defeat. Glory in vanquishing. Clues in the clueless. There was something to be found in loss, after all. In our exile. In our banishment …
The way down is the way up. Our degradation was our exaltation – our lifting up. Our descent was an ascent. Our debasement – our exaltation.
We were climbing. Rising. Even as we fell.
And our stupidity – what should we make of that? What is its significance? Our idiocy was brilliance – the highest brilliance.
The true vine is the false vine. The messiah is the anti-messiah. Sin is salvation. Perdition blooms.
We want our lives to make sense. To have made sense. Every slight. Every indignity. The whole humiliation of part-timing. Every perceived slight.
Our paranoia. Our masochism. Our learned helplessness. Our self-sabotage. Our war upon ourselves. Our ruination. Our self-devouring. All our lack of confidence.
Our impostor’s syndrome. Our sense that we shouldn’t be here. That our very existence was wrong. That a mistake had been made. That we’d slipped through, unaccountably.
That we were chancers. Footpads. Thieves in the temple. Desecrators.
That we were a sign of the end. Marauders. The equivalent of Viking pillagers. Enemies of all true thought. Thought-pirates. Ransackers. Ruiners. Burn-down-the-village types.
She was hardly the true vine, was she?
There is no true vine, she’d say. There is no truth of the earth. Cicero wanted to turn us from all faith in all terroirs.
Her message was that the earth is alien to us. She wanted to cure us. Wanted to make us into proper Gnostics. We should be disgusted, do you see? We had to be disgusted.
But if she wanted to teach us that, then why did she make the wine so disgusting? Doesn’t that make it too obvious? Isn’t that putting a finger of the scales? She should have made this the most delicious wine of all – don’t you see?
Maybe she’s leading up to that. Maybe the last wine will be absolutely delicious.
She really could be leading up to something. The last wine really could be the best wine.
How far are we from the last wine? How many bottles are there?
Cicero’s highest lesson: to find, to truly discover, the disgusting in the delicious. And then the disgusting in all things. Cicero’s leading us step by step, bottle by bottle.
Is each bottle getting a little more disgusting, or are they about the same?
They’re all pretty disgusting.
The thing is, that once we’ve reached a nadir of disgustingness, the bottles should be become nicer again. Positively tasty. And our task would be to discern what is disgusting in that tastiness. To know deliciousness as distraction.
Angels are just postgraduates with wings.
Are there Gnostic angels? Are there nihilist angels?
They’re called demons.
Are there drunken angels? Are there Heideggerian angels?
Angels have feathers and demons have bat wings – that’s all I know.
Work in Progress 