Work in Progress

I’m, like, the Queen of the Pulse. I’m at the heart of the Pulse. Only I know how to use it, really. I am the Pulser. You need a Pulser. Like, an operator. I know how things work.

 

I’m the Pulse Queen. This is reality for me. This is what’s really real.

 

This is who I really am. This is where I come to life. I have webbed fingers here. I don’t know why.

 

It can really fuck up your sense of reality. Or it can show you that reality – what we call reality – is fucked up.

 

Maybe none of it’s real: Philosophy. O.M. You. Me. Alan. Maybe I never was married …

 

You can talk to it, but you have to say Pulse first, so that it can hear you.

Hey Pulse-y … surprise us. Show us something really beautiful. I want to see the most beautiful thing you can make. The most beautiful sunset, or whatever. The most beautiful beach scene. The most beautiful meadow. Wow us, Pulse. I want to see your greatest hits.

 

The Pulse is, like, an alien intelligence. Like it’s trying to learn about us. To communicate with us, even. Like Solaris.

 

Is the Pulse listening? What does Pulse make of all this?

 

We’re Pulse Buddies. I’m not sure what that means. It merges our dreams, or something. It’s reading us, scanning us. Making whatever it’s making in response. Dreaming for the both of us.

 

When they turn the world to shit, there’ll always be the Pulse.

 

The feel of real, baby. Forget your VR goggles. This is all-encompassing. It means your life won’t suck quite as much. You can go somewhere without going anywhere at all.

 

There’s a pressure sensitive underlay. Omnidirectional.

 

The limits of reality are your own imagination, etc. Do anything. Be anyone Go anywhere.

We have a Secret, philosopher. You’re my Secret and I’m your Secret. Tonight’s all about the Secret. We’re going to live forever in the Secret. By grace of the Pulse.

 

What do we share? What are we being shared by? The sharing itself – that’s the answer, philosopher. The Pulse is a sharing. It opens a space. It opens a time. That we can share.

 

It’s the evening’s gift to us. It’s the Pulse’s gift to us. A space outside of space, and a time outside of time. It’s intimacy’s gift. The gift of contact. We don’t have to lie anymore. We don’t have to be who we were, out there.

 

Who are we being shared by? God? Is that the word for it? Or the sharing itself. Friendship. Or love. Or … what?

 

Contact, philosopher. Isn’t that what life’s all about? I want contact.

Don’t you get tired of being yourself? I do. I’d like to be … someone else. A philosopher, for example. But it’s not just any example. Maybe I’d like to do what you do. Or what you don’t do.

 

We’re not who we were. Just for tonight. We’re changing each other. We’re giving each other … potential.

 

Just one night. That’s all it’s going to be. I don’t want to leave my husband. My … lifestyle. I have something to maintain. But for just one night, I will. I want out, for a night. For tonight.

 

Tonight will be forever, right? Tonight will touch eternity. Everything will revolve around tonight.

The whole campus revolves around this. Everyone will have their own personal Pulse one day. Their own virtual reality studio. When reality becomes unbearable, there’s always VR, right?

 

It’s like lucid dreaming, or something. It makes you dream. Only it’s not your dream. It’s, like, the dreaming. That’s an aboriginal thing, isn’t it? What the world is: a dreaming. A dreaming of the gods.

 

The Pulse lets Organisational Management dream. It’s what O.M. dreams of. The secret is that O.M. doesn’t want to be itself. And that’s what the Pulse allows. A release for the organisational manager. A space that you don’t have to organise, or manage. That disorganises you. And unmanages you. From the pressure of being so utterly O.M.

We weren’t complete idiots, after all. We weren’t utter fools. We wanted something – craved something.

We knew something was Wrong, capital W. Vastly wrong. Magnificently Wrong. And that we were here to … to what?

 

We knew. And it was enough that we Knew. Enough that we held the knowledge in our feeling of utter doom. It was enough that we felt it. That we knew the Disaster.

 

We knew the Death. The Horror. We knew, somehow.

Was it intellect? Some instinct? Some temperament? Something indistinguishable from our severe personal problems? From the extent of our fuckedupness? From the depths of our twistedness? Of our convolutions? Twisted and bent into … whatever it is we were.

 

We’re the ones who Know. Even as Cicero only half knew.

Only stupidity could know. Only we could know, in our stupidity.

Stupidity’s an attunement. It’s a way we were disposed to experience things.

Somehow, stupidity plus philosophy. Stupidity multiplied by philosophy. Shot us ahead of Cicero in our knowledge of the world. We were prodigies, of a sort. Savants.

 

The endless end. The apocalypse forever. We lived it. We Knew it. In what we were. As what we were. In our very way of being. In everything we said and did.

We understood the Conditions. The Limits. We knew how it had to be, how it was going to be.

 

We Saw. We Felt. Even Io, who came to believe in God because of it. Even Sophia, who didn’t want to Know anything at all.

 

What Cicero could only approach from the outside. What she could only experience at a remove.

And you, Shiva, wanted to find a literary form for this. A way it could be written down.

 

Who else Knew? Who else Knew? Ian Curtis, maybe. Jandek, maybe.

Who Knows what we know? No one. Who else knows the full extent of the Destruction? Of the Disaster? No one but us. We’re the only ones. That’s what we’re for. That’s our role. To Know all this.

Descent descends through us. The Nothing has come to know itself in us. The void weeps for itself though us.

 

Nihilism knows itself through us. Nihilism awakens to itself. These are nihilism’s tears. Absence’s tears. These are the tears of the empty sky.

Emptiness weeps for itself because it’s empty. Prayers pray for themselves – to be possible.

 

We’re a way the void knows itself. That absence speaks of itself. The way that God is not.

That’s what the humanities are about. Giving a voice to the abyss.

Thinkers who don’t want to think for themselves. Who don’t want to keep what they find. Who are content just to have thought pass through them. By them.

To be brushed by thought. To be touched by it. To become a threshold, nothing more.

Awaiting thought. Waiting for thought. A thought of waiting. Like, a yearning. Being stretched out into yearning. Strewn along yearning.

It’s about what you can’t help being. About how you show what you really are. How do you give yourself away, philosopher. Your … mannerisms. Your gestures. Your quirks. Your idiosyncrasies. All those things about you that are most you. Inconsequential things, maybe. That are just your way of being you. No one but you.

 

I’d like to be with you. Be around you, when you’re just being. Being with you when you’re most who you are.

It’s just like … detachment I’m infinitely detached. That’s my problem. I’m not attached to anything. Not even Organisational Management. I don’t even believe in O.M. And if I don’t believe in O.M, what then?

 

Like I’m dreaming. Like I’m meditating on something. No: like, I’m being meditated. Or dreamed.

 

Do you ever feel unreal? I feel unreal, all the time. That’s my secret. I feel unreal and I feel dead.

I’m not … part of this. My husband knows it. Everyone knows it. They sense it about me. I’m not real enough. I don’t believe in myself enough. Or I don’t believe in myself as this.

I can’t pay their games. Or my game. Or any game.

Am I less real than everyone else, or more real, philosopher?

 

People think I’m weird. I think, anyway. Alan’s a-bit-weird wife. Alan’s growing-weirder wife.

People don’t get me. They don’t understand me. That’s okay, because I don’t get them. I don’t get anyone.

I don’t feel superior to them. I’m just … something else, right?

 

I’m like a ghost who’s left her body. I don’t want to inhabit my body I don’t want to go back in. I’m outside, and happy outside.

A ghost of O.M., philosopher. A ghost of the machine, who isn’t a machine.

 

In another world, who would I have been? In a more meaningful world. In a world that made more sense?

 

Alan asks me where I am, when I’m right there. And I ask myself the same question.

It’s like I’m too vague. I’m not even tuned in, really. I don’t come into focus. Not even for myself. Except when I talk sometimes. Like now. But I never really talk like this.

 

But it’s not I want to say so much as … giving in. Giving myself up to … this speaking, this talking … As if it came before me. As if it had nothing to do with me. As if just passed through me.

I don’t know what I’m saying. I don’t know what I mean. I’m not saying what I mean. But what’s better than saying what I mean.

There are floors and floors, right? There’s room for everyone and everything … You could put the whole of the humanities on one floor of this building. And maybe you will. Put history here, literature there. They could all have a place …

All of the humanities on tap. To offer optional modules to Organisational Management students. Make their CVs a little more lively. Demonstrate an interest in the arts. In classic films. Casablanca and so on. The Seventh Seal. That might impress a future employer.

 

It’s a kind of nursery down here. For the up and comers. Research fellows and the like. There are a lot of Organisational Management research fellows. O.M. sprouts – that’s what we call them. This is the sprouts corridor. The future of O.M.

And there are all these break out rooms for them. Places for them to encounter. To spark ideas.

 

Lecturers’ corridors. Things are more serious up here. Altogether sterner. These guys are going places. They’ve left the frivolities of youth behind them. They’re on the Organisational Management career path. Dreaming only of moving a floor up, to the senior lecturer’s corridor.

 

Hotshot row. We’ve snagged all kinds of hotshots. A lot of new blood. We’ve got some major hires. Major coups. Big names. I've not met everyone yet.

They only passing through, really. They’ll only be here a couple of years. They just jet-set around the place. 

 

The amazing powers of my Organisational Management colleagues. The future of the subject is being decided here.

What future?

The future of the world. Because its all going to be like this. Like these corridors. Until there’s nothing left to organise. Or manage. I’ll bet.

 

So many Organisational Management colleagues to meet. Are you excited, philosopher? Such a variety of viewpoints. So much in common. I'm so glad you're moving into the O.M .family. So glad you’re being embraced. With all your differences. And idiosyncrasies. Philosophy will fit right in … 

Can an organisational manager say these things? Is an organisational manager allowed? Now that we’ve taken over the world, I guess we can say what we like.  

 

I’m discovering my philosophical side. Saying things that are probably terribly gauche in the humanities. Philosophically naïve …

 

You guys have been angsting away for decades. You’re experts at this. And I think I can just talk into the air. Just say these things. Like confide in you. Or confide into the air. Just talk to no one and nothing.

 

And these empty corridors. And this general nothingness. And this void. And this emptiness. Speaking out into it. Trying to fill it. Trying to say something … When all I’m saying is that I can say things. And that I’m surprised I can say things.

 

I can talk Organisational Management very convincingly. But that doesn’t mean I’m actually Organisational Management.