Descent

Descent.

Does this count as team building? As a kind of away day? Would Organisational Management approve?


The dark side of the campus. Of the moon. The dark underside. The underearth.


Katabasis is a journey inward.

I don’t want to go inward. I hate inward. There’s nothing worse than introspection. I can’t stand the inside of my head. My entire life is a way of avoiding what’s inside my head.


You could philosophise very deeply down here.

Don’t start.

Have we reached German depths, do you think? Have we reached Russian depths? What about Indian depths? Vedic depths?


We’re not even that deep underground. God.


What should we take? Have you got anything we could take?

Just the usual disgusting wine.


Are we in Plato’s cave, do you think? We’re in the opposite of Plato’s cave! This is the descent to truth. The truth is buried nowadays. It isn’t there, blazing above the surface. We have to go deep, don’t you understand that? The truth is hidden.


I’m hungry. We should have brought a picnic.

There are no picnics in the katabasis.


You don’t even need to descend, Gazelle. You don’t need to go deeply into yourself. You’ve already found your buried treasure. We’re still looking. We’re still trying to find out what kind of philosophers we are.

And Helmut’s perpetually descending, right? Heidegger’s very into depth. It’s all about the concealed and the hidden.

Do you have depths, do you think Furio? What about you, Driss? Are you deep people? We hate the world – that’s something. We’ve been contorted – buckled – that’s what Livia used to say. Like the buckling of the Earth’s crust that produced the Alps.


We could start a whole new life underground. We could set up camp here, couldn’t we? Escape Organisational Management capture. Work for the revolution down here, in secret. Basically become the paragraduates. What a future.


The descent – we’re becoming who we are, or something. We’re coming to ourselves. we should shed all our world affectations. Do we have any world affectations? Do we have any of them left? It’s a purging. And a purifying.

We’re going for a walk in a tunnel – that’s all.  


Whose idea was this descent? Why do we believe in these things? Why do we think that everything would change if we only did this that? Like, the vastness of our denial is stunning. Our fantasy lives.

And it’s not as if we aren’t ceaselessly reminded of the utter irrelevance of our dreams. It’s not that we don’t come up against it again and again? Why will we never learn?


A descent into face. Farcically.

Even deepening the farce has become farcical. Like a meta farce.

What else could it be?


Think of life above ground, postgraduates. Life not in the eternal darkness. Non tunnel life! Non descent life! What’s the opposite of katabasis? Think of the sun pouring down. Think of baring your solar anuses, or whatever it is you kids get up to. Think of exposing your hairy parts to the sun.