Work in Progress

The universe is a mockery. The distances. The vastness. It laughs at us, all of it. It’s laughing at us. It has infinite scorn for us, looking out with our telescopes. Pointing our telescopes into its darkness.

Laughs? No, it screams at us, if we could hear it. The sky would be full of screaming, if sound could travel through a vacuum.

Everything cries. Cries out. The stars in pain, great pain. Their burning is pain.

They’re stigmata, the stars. They’re white hot nails driven into the palms of darkness. Into God’s palms – God who is darkness.


The universe … is spangled disgustingness … is strewn horror. Is horror stretched out across the sky. Through the near infinite darkness.

The universe is pain. The stars are screaming in pain. And so are we. It’s our pain.


Because we’ve been deserted. Because we’ve been left behind by everything. Because everything’s been left behind by everything. Because the universe was made in its abandonment. And so were we.

Meaning has left. Meaning fled. As we were born.

We’re what comes in the wake of goodness, and meaning, and purpose.

And the humanities are the cry of that. The humanities are their best cry out in their meaninglessness. The humanities are on the cross of meaninglessness.


The humanities cry. The humanities shout upwards. But Organisational Management doesn’t cry. It doesn’t shout in protest. Organisational Management salves the wound. Organisational Management wants to make sure we never cry again.


The darkness isn’t even darkness. It’s not allowed to stay in its darkness. It has to be brought to the light. Our light. We have to Know.

You’ve never even lived in the world. You can’t do anything normal people can do. All the ordinary things – that you despise. You despise us all. You hate ordinary life. You hate ordinary things. You have absolute contempt for everyone in the world. All the civilians. People like me.


And you’re so modest about yourself. You call yourself wretched and stupid, but you don’t mean it. Wretched in relation to who: the philosophical gods?  Stupid in relation to the writers of the greatest philosophical books ever written?

That’s who you are, philosopher: an absolute snob.


Because nothing means anything compared to the only thing you value. Next to the only thing you venerate.

You want something better than the world. Truer than the world.

That’s what philosophy is: a veneration of what has nothing to do with this world.


You want to venerate. You want to bow down to something. So it has to be Thought, capital T. It has to be Philosophy, capital P. It has to be something beyond this world.

That’s why you hate yourself so much.

We were produced by the system as effluvia of the system. As rejects of the system. As run offs of the system.

We were made by the system as the so-called unsystematic. As of no ostensible use to the system. As being supposedly unwanted by the system.

But we were still creatures of the system. We’re still the system’s specimens.

And the system keeps us on. I’m not sure why, but it does. For entertainment? For amusement? Maybe we have some role after all.

Maybe we’re the only ones who can see the ruins. Who can see the old campus as ruin. As Fallen.

Only those who know their failure. Who refuse to be flattered. Who refuse to think themselves elevated. Who know their idiocy. Only they – us – can see things for what they are.


The ruins appear as the opposite of ruins, to technicians of thought. To opportunist types. To Conventionals. To Typicals. To Generics.

Limited intelligences. Operative intelligences. Functional intelligences. Who are good – oh so good – at playing this world, and the game of this world. Of passing through the levels.

Operators. Wheeler-dealers. Impacters. They might as well be remote controlled. Might as well be apps – and perhaps they are. Might as well be synths …


They can’t see the ruins – of course not. They can’t bear what we bear. They can see what we see.

They’re not Appalled. They’re not Horrified. Only the idiot sees the ruins as ruins. Knows the university is over. The university is finished.


The idiot’s revelation. What the idiot Sees.

Refractory. Backwards. Retrarded. Behind the curve, and behind all curves. Lagging. Yet to catch up, and never catching up.

Missing the cues. Possessed of poor timing. Missing all the opportunities. Not even acting in their own interests. Not even advancing their own cause. Not even helping themselves. Not even coming to their own assistance.

Never horizon-scanning. Never keeping up. Never updating themselves. Never up on what’s happening. Never clued in. Clued up! Never with it.

Never keeping a weather eye open. Never seeing things before anyone else. Not watching trends. Paying no attention. Never the unsleeping eye.

Simply doing what they’re doing. Which doesn’t involve very much.


What’s the opposite of kairos – the opportune moment. The right time to strike?

Gnostic energies go underground, that’s what Livia said. Gnostic energies sink and move around in the darkness.

Is that what’s happening?

Gnostic energies are aswirl down here. Can you feel them? Looking to regather themselves. Become something again, one day. Burst back into the light. Regain their apocalypticism. Come to it anew.

So it’s all just waiting to erupt.

Yeah, to erupt and to be defeated it again. Because there is no final apocalypse. There is no last battle. Nothing’s going to resolve. Nothing’s coming to term.  The end isn’t going to deliver us. It’s Hell – perpetual Hell.


We’re tired. We want to lay our heads down. We want to close our eyes once and for all.

We want Finality. We want the god who is death to come. The God of death that is also the death of God.

Because that’s who God is in the wake of hope. When there’s nothing. When nothingness is everything. When the void is all in all. When the screaming doesn’t stop.


There has to be something else. Something otherwise than being. And that’s God.

What do the words mean, otherwise than being?

There must be something better than this. That works against it. That struggles against it. There must be some Against. Some counter principle. Against Organisational Management’s Egypt and Babylon.

Some Promised Land, you mean? Fuck that. We’re locked into this forever.


Turn towards the light.

There is no fucking light.

Black and white elephants, in dignified stillness. A family group. Polar bears in the mist, in low Arctic light. Kelp forests, swaying … filtered sunlight in the water … the rhythmic sway of fronds.

Horses galloping in Iceland, volcanic flows behind them. Wolf packs in the snow, in synchronised formation. Manta rays, seeming to hover in space.

Jellyfish swarms, all gelatinous translucence, all luminous pastels. A lioness, carrying a cub by the scruff of its neck … golden savanna grasses, in the high heat … tenderness amidst savagery … in the wild.

Flowers, O’Keefe style, enlarged into landscapes … into abstraction … into anatomy. Misty bamboo forests … Zen minimalism.

Rice terraces, following hill contours … all stacked up … flooded before the planting season.

Nature wins, philosopher!


And now red pandas, standing, all fluffy. The quokka, the animal that cannot help but smile. Sea otters, floating on their backs, holding paws, a living raft. Desert foxes with oversized ears. Harbour seal pups, with big eyes, with fluffy white coats. Sleeping lion cubs, piled up upon one another. Ducklings following their mother in a line. Tiny tree frogs on leaves. Hummingbirds, hovering. Dolphins riding ocean waves. Bumblebees covered in pollen.

So adorable, philosopher. You can’t deny it. You can’t hate this stuff. Look at you, trying to hate it. Straining. You look constipated, philosopher.

Taking the piss is the art of arts, Livia said. A working class practice, of course. A reminder not to take yourself too seriously. Not to put on airs and graces. To remain who you are and who you’re not. And we need that sometimes.


Taking the piss is the great reducer, Livia said. A way of seeing the world as farce.

Nothing in this world must take itself seriously. Nothing in this world must be taken seriously. That’s what taking the piss shows. And that is the beginning of true seriousness. Which is to say, Gnostic seriousness.


This wasn’t really a lesson for is. It’s a lesson Livia herself had to learn. It’s something that we must teach her, and in fact have been teaching her. What else were our nights at Trillians about?


Taking the piss is a way of seeing through the world, and the pretensions of the world. But it isn’t just dismissive. It isn’t just negativism. It’s a genuine form of dialectics.


Taking the piss is mutual. It’s essentially collective. It’s a way of being together. That never lets anyone get above their station. Never lets anyone become fatally serious. Die of self-importance.

Taking the piss – when done properly. When done right. Could be the foundation of a new kind of philosophical school – a British school, perhaps. A British rebirth of continental philosophy.


Taking the piss is a great art, Livia says. It’s the greatest of arts. It’s what the UK has to bring to the philosophical table. It’s easy to mistake taking the piss for a simple British rejection of the intellect – of what they call pretension, but it’s more than that.

The idiotbuch is part of the whole idiocy.

Idiocy tries to understand itself – hilarious. Idiocy gives itself a world-historical role. A messianic role. Idiocy writes a book about itself … Come on.

You were fooled, Shiva, if you thought you were going to escape the idiocy through some kind of meta-idiocy. Because that meta-idiocy was just more idiocy.


Shiva’s secret dreams of becoming more than an idiot. Your literaro-philosophical dreams. As if they could ever be the equivalent of Livia’s mathematico-philosophical dreams …

You fell into the literary trap by thinking you could escape the philosophical one. We’re all caught in the philosophical trap – sure we are. We’re all caught in the trap of being crap philosophers.

But you – you thought you could escape. You thought you might be some kind of literary stroke non-literary genius after all. You thought there was a secret meaning to you being made leader. When really, you were the greatest joke of all.


Our leader! Our idiot in chief! Who was being led into his own cul-de-sac. Beautiful.

But who’s the joke for? Who’s going to get the joke?

The readers of your idiot book, maybe.

What readers?

And Livia, who’s watching somewhere. And maybe Herwig, too. Livia is laughing and laughing somewhere. With that smile on her face. Clapping her hands.


The joke’s on you, Shiva. And even your name: what a stupid, grandiloquent name. The god Shiva’s supposed to be the one who can destroy everything and start it all over again. And you can’t end shit.

Oh the irony. The cruelty of a name. Your name mocks you. Your name mocks you.

All our names mock us. Taking the piss, Livia called it. That fine English expression.


You believed it, Shiva. You took it seriously. You thought Livia had given you some lofty Task, capital T. You thought you were going to squirm off the philosophical hook. But you just hung yourself on the literary hook instead! Ah, so amusing.

It is funny, in its way. I can laugh at you, anyway.

At least we have the intensity. At least we’ve kept our intensity. At our best! When we’re drunk!

At least we remember who we were, in our part time years. What we were reduced to.

At least we still pick at the scars.


We saw how things Worked, back then. We saw what was Really Going On. The Truth of the University: we saw that. The Truth of everything, the Truth of world!


We want the end, we want death, postgraduates. Our hope is for the end, for the destruction. There’s nothing in this world for us.

We must separate ourselves from this world. Live against it. Turn our faces away.

The only things that cheer us: signs of the end. Even though we know that the end will never come.


A kind of cancer of creation. No: creation as cancer.


Disgust reminds us. Disgust takes us back to what we should feel. What we should know. But only disgust for everything.

It’s not about this or that terroir, but about terroir as such. It’s not about the minerality of this soul, or these specific weather conditions. It’s about the earth in general. As such!

It’s not about this polluted terroir or that one. It’s not about this but of stinking earth. But of all earth.

It’s not about this poison, but the poison of it all. It’s not about this lie, but the Lie of existence. The Lie that we’re made to live.

Livia wanted to pour herself out for us. To pour out her department. her department was a libation. She wanted to destroy what she made. No – to sacrifice it. To offer it up.


Drink this is remembrance of me, that’s what Livia’s saying. Where remembrance isn’t just mourning. It’s conjuring up her presence. It’s placing herself amongst us. Here she is, in this wine. Disgustingly.

The wine enables our communion. It’s what brings us together. Just like those early Christians in the Roman empire. The body of Livia, right?


Judge her by her fruit – this is her fruit. This is wine made from her grapes – from Livia-endorsed grapes. And of course it’s disgusting. What else can it be but disgusting?


Are you saying Livia lactated this wine. Yuck. That she squeezed it out and bottled it up?

Don’t be disgusting. Livia always hated being a mammal, she said. She hated the mammalian. She hated all that fur and cuteness and lactation.


So this is Livia’s milk – the black milk of Livia?


Livia never wanted to suckle us. Except with poison, which is, like, anti-milk.


Ah, the poisoned teats of Livia. Like that woman who tried to poison Krishna but suckling him with a poisoned breast.


Mother’s like the bad breast, and Livia’s the good one.


We’re still suckling on Livia’s teat.

Don’t use the word teat. Don’t say, teat.

It’s time we were weaned. Stand on our own two feet. No longer with Livia’s milk around our mouths.

Jeez – disgusting!