It’s not even that deep. It’s not even a proper katabasis. Hardly the profounds of Newcastle, is it?
Always a farce. The descent was a farce. The quest was a farce. There were no depths. There is no crack of doom. This is the usual play-pretend. The usual farce.
Deepen the farce, right? Livia would approve.
It needs a soundtrack. Play us some music. Read us some poems. Do you know any poems by heart? Give us succour.
How about a Bible reading, Io? Something to cheer us up in our hour of need. Read some of that Book of Job stuff. The sons of the morning and so on. Read us some Ecclesiastes. So we know that someone felt this before.
Something from the gospels, maybe. A parable. We need something. We’ve come to the end of the road. Literally.
Can you smell the piss? Something pissed here. Someone pissed.
And someone was pissed. Look at these beer cans. Someone was pissed down here. Should we get pissed down here?
The paragrads had given up hope. Hope in the world. Hope in the university. The paragrads … didn’t need hope. They went underground in perfect hopelessness.
All the while hoping for something underground.
It was a chance for them to re-gather themselves. To consolidate. To pause. To gather strength. To pause for a while, and to decide what to do. It was a hibernation, of sorts. They wanted to close their eyes for a while.
So do we!
They wanted to lie down in the bosom of the earth. And why wouldn’t they? And why wouldn’t we?
They wanted the blessing of the earth. They wanted the truth. They wanted to be exposed to what the earth was.
And what is the earth?
This, just this. Darkness. Heaviness. Just – itself. Resisting. Everything placed on top of it.
Resisting? How?
Our latest idiot-quest. What’s our motivation?
Stupidity.
What is that we want?
Not to be quite so stupid.
What’s the outcome going to be?
Deeper stupidity.
Will our stupidity ever become profound, do you think? Will it ever have depths?
No.
Maybe Nimrod’s dead. Maybe all we’ll find is Nimrod’s tomb. Maybe all we’ll find is NOTHING.
We’re too late. Wasn’t that always our story? We were too late to make sense of it all. Too late to … find out what we’re for. What we can do. We were always posthumous. We’re the sort who come after, you know that. We’re the kind who miss the party.
Waiting for some Orphic thing. Some initiation thing. The revitalising darkness, or whatever. The scene of some kind of earth-conversion.
But there is no secret in the earth. Except the secret that there are no secrets.
Maybe if we took something. Maybe if we drank something … it would become clearer.
What – what should we take?
What can stupidity discover, except more stupidity? What can idiocy reveal? Not even the depths of our idiocy. Not even its profounds.
What are we hoping to find? There’s nothing but nothing. Nothing other than nothing. Like our whole lives ..
A failing, that’s all. More failing. How can we stand anymore? There has to be some meaning in it, our failing. But no – there’s just failing. Just disaster.
We’ve lost our illusions. We’ve seen them for what they are.
Have we? Is that it?
To have abandoned even our greatest, wildest hopes. Especially those! Those above all!
To give up – finally. That’s what this is about.
The idiocy book can be buried with me. That would be fitting. Never published. Published by the earth. In the earth. Published as unreadable. As buried. Never brought to light. The tomb of the unknown idiocy-book writer. Beneath the earth sky.
Why do you always want to die?
It would make things simple, dying. It would clear everything up. A resolution – isn’t that what we want?
Work in Progress 