Katabasis

We haven’t descended far enough. We’re getting in our own way. We haven’t relinquished enough. We’re still laughing, for God’s sake. Still taking the piss. There’s still humour. Is there supposed to be laughter in the katabasis?

High fucking seriousness. That’s what it’s about. A seriousness we can’t imagine. That we’re not capable of. A spiritual seriousness. Like you’d find in Dostoevsky or Tarkovsky. A sense that it all hangs in the balance. Everything! Which it does.


We haven’t suffered enough. If we’d suffered, we wouldn’t be so irreverent. So piss-takey.

Always laughing at ourselves. Always poking fun. Never simply serious. It’s always a sham seriousness. A distanced from itself seriousness.

Seriousness, doubled up. Never undergone. Never suffered. We haven’t reached the bottom. Nor will we. It’s our temperaments. We’ll never get what we should out of a Grundstimmung. Something stops us.

Our Britishness. This country. The UK … UK humour. We’re never as serious as we should be. We can’t take ourselves seriously enough. We can’t reach it, inner seriousness.

We can never pray, for example. We lack the sincerity. The openness. The vulnerability. We can’t open ourselves. What does God think of us? Do you thinkGgod’s laughing? With us? At us? Will God forgive us for being ourselves? For getting in our own way?


Katabasis. We haven’t descended far enough. We haven’t reached the bottom.

Seriousness. We haven’t claimed it for ourselves. Deep seriousness. That we might reach in prayer. In meditation. In silence. In waiting that is nothing other than waiting.


But we stand in our way. Our characters. Our temperament. Our humour. Why can we never take ourselves seriously enough? Why can we never attain it: the seriousness that would result from a true katabasis?


Our journey to centre of the earth. Our journey to our own centre. To our inner citadels.


Can’t we get it together to be seriousness?. Just lie there like Stalker. Pondering in infinite seriousness the infinite seriousness of all things.


Katabasis. Into the profounds. The depths. The fundaments.

When stupidity descends to discover the origins of its stupidity. The grounds of its stupidity. To discover what its stupidity is.


Katabasis is a journey inward, not a journey downward. A journey into death! Into the unconscious! Into suffering, or whatever. Katabasis is supposed to be a prelude to insight or rebirth or transformation. A downgoing.