Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang

Alice Law set out to rescue her advisor’s soul from the Eight Courts of Hell.

Dante’s account was so distracted with spiteful potshots that the reportage got lost within. T. S. Eliot had supplied some of the more recent and detailed landscape descriptions on record, but The Waste Land was so self-referential that its status as a sojourner’s account was under serious dispute. Orpheus’s notes, already in archaic Greek, were largely in shreds like the rest of him. And Aeneas—well, that was all Roman propaganda.

“Hell’s lonely,” said Peter. “You’ll want company.” “Hell is other people, I’ve heard.”

The paradox—the crucial element. The word paradox comes from two Greek roots: para, meaning “against,” and doxa, meaning “belief.” The trick of magick is to defy, trouble, or, at the very least, dislodge belief. Magick succeeds by casting confusion and doubt. Magick taunts physics and makes her cry.

Hell, she had read, was an inconstant and shifting plane. Its landmarks were conceptual, not fixed. She did not know quite what this meant, but following scholarly convention she interpreted this as, Hell

She wondered at the limits of ghostly mischief—whether, if she wanted to, she might simply haunt the halls of Cambridge forever.

All the ghost stories were wrong; hauntings were so rarely malicious. The dead only wanted to feel included.

An unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates tells us. Therefore to seek reincarnation is to gamble with overwhelmingly bad odds on a life not worth living. For instance, once reincarnated, we could end up doing something like—I don’t know, working rice paddies in China.”

“I just mean—I don’t know, taking into account when they were written, and the author’s social context, and such.” “Historicization, Murdoch. That’s what we call it. What, do you just take everything you read at face value?” “I mean, if the math checks out.” “Unbelievable,” said Alice. “This is why everyone hates logicians.”

This theory, though not universally accepted, did explain why Dante’s Hell involved all the poets and artists and politicians he was personally familiar with over his lifetime. And why paintings of the Buddhist hells displayed all the ritual trappings of Chinese palaces: gardens and pools and harems of concubines. And why both Greek and Mesopotamian visions of the afterlife involved neat, orderly systems of justices, gatekeepers, and accountants armed with records and scales, processing lines of the dead the same way passport offices process citizens. At the end of the day, human beings preferred the predictable order of their known bureaucracies. One’s sins took on meaning in the context of their moral universe, comprised of their loved ones, their idols, their rivals, their victims. Dante saw philosophers and politicians. Aeneas saw ghosts of warriors past. One was hurt most by what one knew.

“Christ,” said Peter. “Hell is a campus.”

Most baffling of all is the question of punishment. What purpose does it serve? Is it rehabilitative—must we only suffer until we’ve learned our lessons? Is it retributive—must we balance the karmic scales, lose an eye for an eye, and suffer as much as the suffering we wrought? How many hours in pits of boiling water balance out a murder? Is punishment a form of contrapasso, as Dante describes, wherein punishments arise from the nature of the sin itself and represent wrongdoing’s poetic opposite? Does punishment entail the universalization of broken maxims, as Kant theorized? Is Hell one great metaphysical manifestation of the Golden Rule?

There were many rivers of power in this world—there were rivers of death, and rivers of love; rivers that could grant immortality, and rivers that could take it away. Some washed away sin; some merely washed away the guilt. But only the Lethe washed memory.

Heraclitus had made the profound observation that one could never step in the same river twice, because it wouldn’t be the same river, and one wouldn’t be the same person. The Lethe, then, equated forgetting with rebirth. The continuity of one’s soul was tied inextricably to the persistence of one’s memories.

Peter took the worst news with a blink and a shrug. Professor Grimes would impose the most insane deadlines, and Peter would only laugh. She wondered if this was the consequence of winning every lottery of birth. You refused to think things could go wrong, because they had only ever gone right.

The point was that Professor Grimes hadn’t tormented just anyone. He’d tormented them. Because they were strong enough to withstand it. Because they kept the faith. Because they were special, and worth the effort, and because whatever they became when he was done with them would be so dazzling.

So perhaps she watched Peter more than was good for her. Her eyes lingered on his shadow every time they were in the same room. She studied his habits, his mannerisms, the cadence of his speech. She pondered which traits she could adopt. She couldn’t get away with his haplessness; no one would afford her that much grace. And she couldn’t study the way he did, or the way he claimed he did; she could not comprehend dense pages in a single glance. But maybe she could try to move with his lightness, or at least smile half as often.

There was a time when she felt all she ever wanted to do was to make Peter Murdoch laugh.

The first rule every graduate student learned was that at the base of every paradox there existed the truth. That you should never fully believe your own lie, for then you lost power over the pentagram. That magick was an act of tricking the world but not yourself. You had to hold two opposing beliefs in your head at once. You had to know your way back.

“You don’t reincarnate if you die in Hell. Hell already operates on another metaphysical plane. We’re all soul stuff here. When you die in Hell, it’s not just your mortal body that disintegrates—it’s your soul stuff, too.” She smacked her chest. “All this, it dissipates. If you die down here, that’s it for you. Total annihilation of the self.”

“One day it all seemed so silly to me, and I couldn’t stop laughing about it. The symbolic system collapsed. You write a good paper, and it’s rejected because your reviewer was having a bad day. You’re a perfect fit for a job, and you lose to the committee chair’s godson. Once you have a job it doesn’t get better—do you know how many people are passed over for tenure because someone somewhere once felt they were rude at a party? I mean, what’s the fucking point? I couldn’t keep up the charade, but also I didn’t see the value in anything else, so I just put a stop to it all. I could not care anymore.

Her own entrance riddle had been the Ever Better Wine Paradox. Suppose you are gifted a bottle of wine that only gets better with time—there is no upper limit on how delicious it can become. Suppose also you are an immortal. When is it rational for you to drink the wine? If you popped the cork, you would be choosing an inferior wine compared to a future possible wine. But if, applying that logic, you never popped the cork at all, then you were worse off compared to every alternative. Alice had answered with the argument that only adopting an attitude of accepting a satisfactory, not optimal, outcome could avoid the worst possible outcome. The principle of choosing the best possible option was, in practice, self-defeating. You were better off arbitrarily deciding to wait five years, then opening the wine and enjoying whatever you got. But the lesson there, the nugget of truth within the paradox, was that happiness was comparative, not absolute. And this meant that if you could just outlast the other guy—if you could hold off even ten minutes before opening the cork—then at least you wouldn’t be the fool who drank the shitty wine.

With angry sulking men, the secret was holding your ground. You didn’t get rebellious, no—that was asking for a slap to the face. But you didn’t self-flagellate, either. When you acted like you ought to be whipped, that only confirmed to them that you should. One should never cower. The secret rather was to keep talking as if you deserved no punishment at all, and then to distract them with something they wanted more than they wanted to hurt you.

Consider the following sentence: This statement is false. It is devastatingly simple in its breaking of logic. You cannot believe it. You cannot disbelieve it. It has no truth value that you can settle on. You’re stuck in the middle, thrown on an endless loop from one end of the sentence to the next.

And no, perhaps their pub debates were not in the field of pure truth that Professor Grimes liked to go on about. Perhaps these were not the discoveries that would change the world for anyone except for people very sexually attracted to trains. But was it not at least training for something similar? To rejoice in the acrobatics of thought—not as Stoics did, which was to manipulate language for mean and personal gain, but to sharpen their tools in preparation for the real digging. What greater pleasure could there be? What else was life for?

“Schopenhauer argued that all art is merely representational and allegorical except for music, which is the closest thing to pure will,” he told her. “But I find in our pentagrams something akin to music. Not in its total abstraction from everyday phenomena, but in its ability to pierce through to the center of them. That shining, cloudless plane of truth on which nothing else matters. It is as Heisenberg said, dear Alice. That modern physics has decided in favor of Plato, that the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense, but forms, and ideas. And when you have complete mastery of these ideas, when you can hold them in your palm and twist and tease them at will—then you will have stepped closer to God. It will feel meticulous, yes. Petty, fleeting, pedantic. But all the more reason to double your drive, and clutch at every precious wisp of truth you glimpse.”

“Well, I think the biggest misconception about Buddhism is that karma functions as this grand tally that you count up at the end of the day.” Elspeth waved a hand. “But it’s not like you get five hundred good points and eight hundred bad points, so that in Hell you have to account for a net three hundred deficit. It’s nowhere so neat. Karma is more like—hm. You might say karma is like a seed. Seeds grow into fruit. Karma is a natural consequence. Badness accrues. It affects the way you live your life, how you perceive the world. When you do evil things, you see the world as petty and selfish and cruel. And what you experience in Hell is just the final ripple effect of your original evil. You get precisely what you asked for. And I think the whole point of Hell is to show you the full extent of what you wanted.”

Alice, however, was still convinced by the impossible mean—the idea that there might exist some perfect line between femininity and subjugation, wherein if she could only wear clothes that were both perfectly attractive and perfectly modest, she could both enjoy the attention that being a woman in the department got her while also commanding respect as a scholar. The chances this mean existed were vanishingly small, but still Alice clung to this hope.

She thought she’d learned to inhabit the impossible ideal: the girl who was eminently fuckable but unreachable, and therefore virtuous and perfect. The girl who was everything all at once. It was the waning days of second-wave feminism, and all the girls in Alice’s generation were so tired of being told they’d been born to be raped, oppressed, silenced. Surely this was not the entire picture; surely there was some power in their sex. Alice was both attractive and restrained, and this made her feel superior, even as she witnessed Professor Grimes disappearing into hotel rooms with other women from the conference. Alice was different from them. They were wives in the making, and she was a magician.

“The difference between women like me and girls like you is that we always understood the battle was never over. Your cohort has chosen to live like the rules don’t apply to you. And it seems to work. I salute you girls, I support you. I wish I could have done the same. But you can’t just cry wolf when things don’t go your way. What you must realize, Alice, is that you cannot just take refuge in feminism when it suits you.”

Perhaps human intelligence was a mistake, and everyone who celebrated the escape from the Garden of Eden was wrong. Perhaps the gift of rationality did not outweigh the debilitating agony that came with it.

Let them think him cold, rude, antisocial. Growing up with a chronic illness just meant choosing between bad and worse, and Peter had determined that day that no matter what else happened, he was never again to be the object

Perhaps he leaned into it. Perhaps he put on an affectation sometimes—he would talk about solutions to problem sets in a dreamy, indifferent voice as if he hadn’t spent hours working through them, or pretend he hadn’t done the reading when in fact he’d stayed up all night. If ever he had to leave class for the bathroom, he claimed he was going for a smoke. And if ever his hospital stay lasted more than a week, he pretended he’d buggered off to Barcelona or Göttingen—this was sometimes true, since his parents liked to attend conferences and he liked to accompany them—or just stayed home and slept, because he felt like it, because Peter Murdoch didn’t need to attend lectures to ace a class.

She didn’t think in straight lines; she was always zigzagging outward. She was always wondering how unrelated disciplines might speak to one another, or dredging up random shit from archives no one had ever heard of. Can you imagine a world without memory? she would ask. Can we form meaningful relationships if we have the memories of goldfish? Does your pet know that they will one day die? Does teleportation equal death?

Before, Peter had simply slid into the background, out of orbit. He passed in and out of friendships, always a prized acquaintance, never a constant. Here Alice had become a constant. He could not give her up. Still, the memory of little Jemma Davies was stamped in his mind, and so too the terrifying moment when he could no longer tell friendship from charity.

“How do you know?” “Because of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem.” “Of what?” “It’s a theorem in mathematics.” Peter sounded bizarrely chipper. “I learned about it when I was a child. Basically, it says no theory of mathematics can ever be complete, because for any reasonable mathematical system there will always be truths that the system cannot prove. Math has its limits. There’s always something we don’t know. Some people think Gödel’s theorem proves the existence of God.” “But it doesn’t prove anything at all.” “It does, though. It proves there’s always another option. It proves no system is ever closed.”

“Lines that are parallel meet at Infinity!” Euclid repeatedly, heatedly, urged Until he died. and so reached that vicinity: in it he found that the damned things diverged. —PIET HEIN, “PARALLELISM”

On Paradoxes The reason why paradoxes trouble us is not because their conclusions are true. The donkey does not starve. The world does not consist of unending staircases. Of course Achilles could outrun a turtle, of course the arrow hits its mark, of course the heap runs out. The principle we must accept if we want to go on with our lives is that no paradox makes the world stop functioning as it should. The laws of the universe get their say. Things always snap back to how they should be, and a paradox always eventually runs out its charge. The only reasons why paradoxes perpetuate for as long as they do is because we let them. No—the reason paradoxes trouble us is because their absurd conclusions make us rethink all of our premises. A paradox is like a staircase, in which each step leads inexorably to the destination. But you get to the top, and the destination is impossible; you’ve stepped off into empty air. So one of the steps must be folly. Because the conclusion must necessarily be false, because we cannot live in a world where logic does not work, one of our premises must necessarily be flawed. This is the source of our unease. A paradox means that somewhere along the path, we have gotten something deeply, terribly wrong.

How much a simple word of encouragement could mean to a young and insecure mind. Professors never knew the impact of their utterances. They seemed not to realize that a careless comment, the briefest smile, could make or break a student’s day. Professors, who saw dozens of hopeful faces over the course of a day, forgot always that they were their students’ entire universe.

Dis was the extremes of human perfection. Dis was faultless marble, balustrades and domes, tiled courtyards lined with columns. Borges had written that the city was horrific, so horrific that the mere fact of its existence polluted the past and future, and compromised the stars; but had Alice and Borges witnessed the same city? Where Borges had found a perversion, Alice found a miracle. Dis was a millennium of effort, a haven constructed by those without salvation. Alice could see so clearly what it was trying to be, and what it could never be. But even in that fundamental lack there was something lovely, transcendent, a testament to human will. The city of Dis was defiant to the idea of an afterworld itself. They had left the campus behind now; this was a temple. Damn us, it said, and we will make Hell shine.

Now, Alice knew from conversations in hall that the philosophers at Cambridge were greatly concerned with the difference between killing and letting die. Some argued that there was no distinction: that if you knew the cause of death and failed to stop it even if you were able, then that was morally tantamount to murder. Others disagreed. Letting die might be morally callous, they argued, but it entailed refusing to get involved in a situation, not bringing it about. If letting die was so evil, were we responsible for not doing anything about world poverty? About orphans starving continents away? So one might reasonably convince Alice that no, none of this was her fault.

“It’s all just sensations in the end, Alice Law. Pain or pleasure, mirror images of each other. And both preferable to dead time. Time crawls here. You do anything to feel.”

Was this the end point of existence? Alice could have wept with the ridiculousness of it. Now she understood Hell in full. She saw its intricate design; could understand that it was no random imitation of living rituals but a cruel mirror; that all its karmic reflection just was to show life’s worthlessness to begin with. The point was not rehabilitation but a stripping down to form, to show that humans were blindly writhing worms, rooting about to feel anything at all.

“Every religion supplies an origin of the universe. Every tale has a beginning. Every beginning implies an end. The one became a million which will diminish to one again. The fires of Ragnarok will split the earth and birth it anew. Even Father Time is not infinite; even he will be slain.”

Here was a riddle: If nothing lived in Hell, then how was it that bones were stripped bare? For it was hawks and buzzards, nibbling crawling bugs, that made skeletons gleam so on earth. Death was scrubbed clean because life went on; rot and decomposition were growth; the cycles begot one another, so how did death polish itself in these wastelands, where time stood still? Boundaries are porous, she thought. That must be it; the only explanation. Life seeped in, even here at its antithesis; life made death beautiful, and kept the circle going. But the implications of this were profound! This meant there were no absolutes, if even death itself was not an absolute. Peter and Gödel were right, she thought. The universe is incomplete, and I am one of their moving exceptions. But what does the fact of me prove, except that I am here?

My name is Alice Law. Sometimes I am very clever but most of the time I am not. I have been a good person sometimes, and a bad person at others. Sooner or later I will die. But before I do, I will try—I will try very hard—to make it count.