Cult of Ffynche
Non Est Festinandum
Bartleby Legges It!
REUTERS / SEPTEMBER 21, 2020/ 4.30 AM
It has been reported that Bartleby Legge, director of the renowned Zimmerman Institute, has resigned from the editorial board of The Cult of Ffynche website with immediate effect.
In a rare, if brief, interview with The Idler magazine, the enigmatic director offered no specific reason for this surprise rupture but referred — along with his onerous Institute duties, which involve, when there’s no cricket on, much prolonged pondering of what might be done next — to ongoing tensions between his lifelong commitment to the Subjunctivist movement and his responsibilities as a senior Cult member.
When pressed on the nature of this movement Legge remained opaque, but it is known that in the 1960’s, Newcastle University art department, where he was then a student, was a leading centre of the most radical wing of Subjunctivism.* These were years of fearsome ideological schisms and counter-schisms, culminating in a proposed breakaway Provo Procrastinistas cabal, but the consequential insuperable existential zugzwang resulted in catatonia.
After the heady upheavals of the 60’s came the retrenchment of the 70’s and the advent of Neoconservatism, with its supine intellectual handmaiden, the insufferable and all-conquering Postmodernism.
Like many dissident groups in this period, the Subjunctivists lost adherents and disappeared. It would seem, however, that the future director remained loyal to the cause, and he claims, with the exception of a short period of proper work (‘The Lost Years’) and the occasional emergency, never to have actually actualised any proposed course of action.
A rare photograph of Bartleby Legge, taken by a nosey neighbour, standing outside the Institute wondering whether to go out somewhere or other.
Legge concluded the interview by explaining that he could no longer compromise his principles for the sake of 'a bunch of jumped-up rural nitwits who have an obsession with ‘challenging ritual’ and delusions of imminent global fame'.
The sole Twitter response: ‘He always was a lazy git’.
* The subjunctive is a verb form or mood used to express things that could or should happen. It is used to express a wish, or a desire, or a hope, or possibility, or a doubt, or uncertainty.
