Can you feel the agency of the earth? The vibrancy of matter or whatever?
The festering of matter, more like.
Stuff’s rotting down here. Stuff’s compositing. Compacting. Releasing its gases.
It’s like it’s sentient or something. Like it’s developed its own kind of AI. Tellurian intelligence. Thoughts of the earth. What is it thinking?
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.
Disgust is the true descent. The true katabasis. And we have to fall ever deeper. Drink ourselves into the fundament.
Gaia thoughts. Slow, dark thoughts. Dreaming thoughts. Because the earth’s asleep – deeply so. The earth’s in a trance.
Are those stalactites? Made of mud?
Who made these tunnels?
Maybe the Bug …
I think it’s mudworms.
Mudworms!?
Like in Dune. Harness them somehow. Ride them. Through the tunnels. There’s, like, no trace of any worm. Launch the assault on Organisational Management towers.
I think we should harness the Bug. Calling: Bug! Buggers!
It’s darkening. I swear it’s getting darker.
In the gnostic darkness.
Is that what this is?
Only here in the darkness could we formulate these thoughts. Only down here could they come to formulation.
Drinking at the centre of the earth. Drinking at the earth’s core. Drinking in the depths.
Everything in the earth hates the campus, I know it. It’s, like, anti Organisational Management campus.
Depth without substance. Depth, but nothing else.
It’s like something’s rotting under here. Something fetid.
I thought we’d be used to the disgusting. But this really is disgusting. Something’s shat here. Something vast. Some beast that has eaten all the wrong things has actually shat.
Drink it down to the dregs. Drink it and know –
Know what?
The depths of the earth.
So is it getting more disgusting the more we go down?
The song of the void.
No, it’s drilling.
That’s a gnostic rumbling. Those are gnostic energies.
It’s the buzzing of the Bug’s wings we can hear. The Bug’s buzzing just beneath this reality as in an adjacent dimension.
We woke up the Bug. And the Bug doesn’t like to be woken up.
The Bug was dreaming.
The underearth: this is where all revolution comes from. The bowels of the earth, where all the ferment brews.
The earth is only quicksand, and it’s sucking us down.
Is there still darkness on the face of the Deep? Is the earth still without form and void?
A world without philosophy – what’s that? A world without earth. A world without truth. And light everywhere. And nothing but light. A world without shadows. A word full of Organisational Management antilife. False light, from the false heaven.
What can we hear down here? Only essential things. Only the great turning of things. Only the Same, being the same, turning around the Same. Just the empty perpetuation of the Way Things are.
They’re building down. Burrowing. This is a philosophy warren.
There are places like this all over the country – that’s the rumour. An underground resistance network. Whenever the humanities are threatened, this is what happens. A kind of withdrawal. It was like those ancient people in Derinkuyu, with their underground city. It’s like monasteries during the Dark Ages. Keeping the flame of civilization alive.
It’s like a doomsday cult.
Admiring the brickwork. The arch.
It was built really well.
Victorians, right?
It’s kind of glowy. There are glowing things on the wall.
It’s a glowing mould. Mould’s what the paras cultivate. They actually live on mould – on different kinds of mould. There are moulds for all purposes under fucking heaven for the paragrads.
What are we hoping to find? What’s going to show itself in an underground revelation? What are the secrets of Newcastle boulder clay?
We should start some underground ritual. Like a sweatlodge, or something … Maybe we should have some underground therapy. Does therapy work when it’s closer to the centre of the earth?
Shiva’s going to enter some Hindu ecstasy. Of the soil! Of the earth!
The unilluminable. The always-buried.
Work in Progress 