THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE DOLEFUL CAMPUS,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO ETERNAL DEBT,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE FORSAKEN GENERATION.
FREEDOM OF THOUGHT INSPIRED MY FOUNDERS;
POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY RUINED ME,
COUPLED BY BETRAYAL OF PRINCIPLE AND PLEDGE.
BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS
WERE MADE, NOW I SHALL MARK YOU ETERNALLY.
ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE.
I saw these words spelled out on a digital display
Above the entrance to the Knowledge Gateway.
‘Master,’ I said, ‘this is scary.’
He answered me, speaking with a drawl:
‘Now you need to grit your teeth,
This isn’t the moment to shit yourself.
We’re at the spot I spoke about
Where you will see souls in pain
Who perverted the good of intellect.’
Placing his hand on my shoulder, and flashing
Me a smile, though not one that reassured me,
He led me in.
Here groans and cries and shrieks of grief
Echoed through the freezing fog
And made me weep with fear;
A confusion of tongues,
Greek, Polish, Arabic, German, Dutch,
Strained with notes of tortured woe,
Rose into the sightless air,
Like frenzied seagulls
at a landfill site.
And I: ‘What’s this
noise I hear?
Who are all these tortured by grief?’
And Berrigan replied: ‘They are surfers,
Dudes who coasted through life, drifting in and out
Of degrees and jobs without conviction.
They are mixed with those repulsive civil servants
Neither faithful nor unfaithful to their leaders,
Whose love was all for self.
Oxbridge, to keep its reputation, annulled
Their degrees, and even Essex
would not honour them.’
‘Master,’ I asked, ‘what’s eating them?
Why are they making such a racket?’
‘That,’ he says, ‘I can tell you in a nutshell.
They have no hope of death
Yet the life they lead is so low
That they envy all the other shades.
Nobody on earth will remember them;
Funding bodies dismiss them out of hand.
Let’s not talk about it: look and walk on.’
And as I looked I saw in the gloom
A giant screen, and on it the giant mouth
Of a talent show host, a man called Callow,
If I caught it right; in front of the screen
Such a crowd had gathered, I wondered
How death could have undone so many.
A few of these tortured souls I recognised,
Among them a couple of red-heads:
One who had amassed a few credits
In Philosophy and Literature before
Drifting into telecommunications sales,
Another who had been unable to choose
Between poetry and stand-up.
These wretches were stripped naked
And picked on by wasps and hornets
Which buzzed in their ears
And made their swollen faces run with blood
And pus, where fat maggots fed.
When I looked away from this awful sight
I saw another crowd queuing by the bank
Of a swamp which had formed in a building site.
‘Master,’ I asked,
‘Are these more students? What makes them
So eager to make the crossing?’
And Berrigan, my guide, replied:
‘Hold your horses, you’ll see
soon enough.’
And I, biting my lip,
Said nothing more,
until we reached the muddy shore.
Then suddenly, coming towards us in a bark,
An old man, hoary white with eld,
Bellowed: ‘Woe to you, wicked students! Hope not
Ever to see a grant again. I come to take
You to the main campus
Into eternal loans, there to dwell
In sticky heat and dry-ice. And thou, who there
Standest, live spirit! Get thee hence, and leave
These who are dead.’ And when he saw I didn’t
Budge, he added: ‘By other way
Shalt thou come ashore, not by this passage.
Thee a nimbler boat must carry.’
Then Berrigan spoke slowly: ‘This is no time to get
Imperious, Dr May, it is willed by Senate,
That is all you need to know. Step aside.’
His words brought silence to the woolly cheeks
Of the boatman guarding the muddy swamp,
Whose eyes glowed like burning coals.
But all the students, shagged out and naked,
Grew pale, and their teeth began to chatter,
At the pronouncement they’d heard.
They cursed the day they were born, they
Cursed the coalition, they cursed their fathers
For not having vasectomies.
Then, like lost souls, wailing bitterly,
They squelched knee-deep in mud, towards
The shore of the forsaken building site.
Dr May called them together with his
Ferryman’s song, and with his oar he walloped the
Latecomers, saying: ‘Put that on your SACS forms!’
As at the start of the Autumn term,
When the leaves begin to fall,
Covering the ground with a slippery carpet,
So did the doomed freshers
Drop from that shore into the bark,
Lured by the siren song.
Off they go across the swamp waters,
And before they reach the opposite shore
A new crowd gathers on this side.
‘My friend,’ Berrigan said to me then,
‘Everyone who wants to get a degree
Gathers here, from all corners of the globe;
They want to cross the swamp, they are eager;
It is the fear of being left on the
Scrapheap that urges them on
Into debt and toil and hardship;
Only a fool would follow, so if Dr May
Warns you off, you see what he’s saying.’
As he finished, the ground shook with a violent
Tremor, as the Wivenhoe fault opened
Anew in the Palaeozoic rocks.
A whirlwind burst out of the cracked earth,
A wind that crackled like an electric storm;
It struck my body like a cattle prod
And as a man in Guantanamo Bay, I fell.