The University in the University

W. dreams of leaving the university behind. He dreams of ending our captivity.

We need to discover the university in the university, W. says. We have to turn the university inside out like a glove, exposing it to everything it excludes …

To the working class, barred from the university by the cost of studying. To the insane, barred from the university because of their wayward reasoning. To the melancholics, barred from the university because of the misery of their lives. To the alcoholics, barred for shouting, barred for fighting. To the homeless, the vagrants …

W. reminds of how Robert Lenkiewicz, the Plymouth Rembrandt, used to let vagrants live in his studio. There were about fifty of them, in and around the huge canvasses he liked to paint, most of them crazy, most of them disturbed, screaming and shouting …

Lenkiewicz believed it was possible to become an ‘artist-saint’, he said. He was interested in ethics, he said, in a certain way of behaving, that was at one with painting. That was part of his calling.

One of the vagrants hanged himself in the studio. Lenkiewicz remembers cutting him down. The vagrant had lost an eye a few months ago, crashing through a chemist’s window, looking for a fix …

And he embalmed another vagrant, keeping his corpse beside him in the studio, to remind him not of his own mortality – that would be banal, W. says, but of the mortality and vulnerability of others.

Lenkiewicz used to keep a record of what they said, his vagrants, W. says. 'Without suffering, I'm lost: I wouldn't know what to do without suffering'. That's attributed to the Singer, he says, reading from his notebook. And there’s Black Sam, who speaks like a voiceover from a Malick film:

We're all strange people; we're all escapin'; we're all fanatics.

You searchin' for somethin', but what? If I could have one spark, just one spark.

There's some force that governs. Some gigantic force, but what does it govern?