Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang

“Alice Law, you naughty girl. You’re trying to go to Hell.”

She would sever a limb. She would give anything, so long as she still had her mind, so long as she could still think.

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.

Oh, magicians do really well in consulting, they said. Employers like critical thinking and problem-solving skills, they said. Fewer people die in industry, they said.

Alice, who up until then had been blessed with kind and helpful professors, didn’t know how bad an advisor really could be. She thought, then, that if you didn’t get along with a professor, that was your fault. She thought, simply, that she would make sure she was in the half that did finish.

“I’ll write you the best recommendation I can,” Dr. Mills had said. “You have a good shot everywhere you apply—I’d feel good in your shoes. But do be careful, Alice. At this stage it seems like all that could possibly matter is getting in. Remember there is more at stake than your advisor’s approval, however. And there’s more to life than magick.”

Though she would never admit it, the idea of working with someone dangerous excited her.

Alice had dazzled her way through years of higher education by being a teacher’s pet; by miraculously succeeding where others had failed.

She relished the thought that her advisor might be hars...

cruel to others—for that made his attentions to her worth all the more. She liked being the exception to the rule. Favoritism was w...

You only had to try hard enough, to grind through sleepless nights, to meet his every impossible standard so that he considered you worthy of respect.

Stay silent and ignore the chattering crowd—this was proof you had something real to be proud of.

The Christian explorer John Bancroft described Desire as a false imitation of paradise wherein punishment lay in temptation. You succumbed, you indulged, and you were never able to leave.

“Humans, unlike animals, are born with the faculty of reason. This places us above beasts, and near to God. And so as Aristotle says, we ought to be pro-immortal, and go to all lengths to live a life in accord with our supreme element. The life of the mind is all there is. Anything else is degeneracy, is bodily, is filth.”

Sex was not a noble desire, it was such an embarrassing capitulation.

Her mind felt stretched thin, crammed with things she could never dispense with. She had not realized, until that day, how humans needed to forget to function.

Their generation was the most decadent and stupid of all.

Grimes’s generation were at least war magicians; they had pushed the field forward by leaps and bounds in its practical applications. But Alice and Peter’s cohort quibbled over philosophical details. They made flashy gadgets for toy companies. The best among them sought residencies in Vegas; the worst among them became consultants. No doubt, magic was on the decline. And this was merely a symptom of a world where children did not read but sat drooling before a screen; where artists splattered paint at random and thought themselves Michelangelo’s equal. Theirs was not a world of learned men; it had no attention for sustained inquiry; the people of their age only wanted tabloids, gossip, entertainment. Civilizational collapse, impending apocalypse—they forgot the greatness of their forefathers, they were trapped in pointless little debates; they could not get out, no one knew how to think anymore.

And classical logic especially falls apart as a language applied to human relationships, which are messy and complicated and often situated in that excluded middle; that space where no one is right and no one is wrong and things are neither true nor false.

Here, however, to get what you wanted meant making sure others did not get it. Bhishma said in the Mahabharata that from covetousness proceeded sin. Saint Paul warned the church that money was the root of all evil.

Parfit argued that the qualities which we think define essential personhood—psychological connectedness, for instance—do not actually ground any deeper fact. We might share the same cells, bodily continuity, and memories as previous iterations of ourselves. But that is all. There is no further fact of the matter—no essential us hovering like a specter. We bear the same relationship to the version of ourselves from ten years ago as we might to a sibling.

but she did find this perspective liberating. It helped her understand that she had never really known Peter, and he had never really known her. She knew only a version of him, at a brief moment in time. But without those hazy recollections, without the historical fact that she had once giggled helplessly with her head lolling on Peter’s shoulder, she had no significant relationship to the Alice Law who was falling in love with Peter Murdoch at all.

And if that was true—then what difference did it make, what history you had, what love you’d shared? That staircase was gone; the planks had reassembled, and the soul you had come to know was a newly crafted fiction. And so perhaps it was entirely possible—common, even—for you to look into the eyes of someone you’d been falling in love with, someone you had spent every waking moment with, whose breathing sounded as familiar as your own—and fail to recognize them at all.

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.

How good it felt when she seemed to abandon her body altogether—when she became fully incorporeal, drifting happily in a universe of ideas. She was very proud of the days that she forgot to eat. Not because she had any revulsion for food, but because it was some proof that she had transcended some basic cycle of need. That she was not just an animal after all, held captive by her desires to eat and fuck and shit. That she was above all a mind, and the mind was capable of miraculous things.

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?

“Eternal recurrence,” Peter murmured. “Everything that has happened will happen again.”

“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.

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.”

All the qualities she admired—genius, brilliance, a sharp and cruel intellect—inscribed after all in a crude and mortal body.

And she suspected that Helen knew, anyhow. Not the details. Only the shape. Helen must have known, because she had seen it all happen before, must have been through it herself, and here she still sat where she was. Her own office. Courtyard window, mahogany desk, tenure. What did that take? Alice wondered. What cages of beliefs kept Helen going? Helen was not mocking her. She had laid out the blueprint. Believe the lie—trust the lie—it is the only thing you have. Stay in the cage and paint the walls. If you do not, then you must quit; but if you can delude yourself long enough, then your delusions might very well come true.

No, what hurt was how easily he could reduce her to a thing. No longer a student, a mind, an inquisitive being growing and learning and becoming under him—but just the barest identity she had been afraid to be all along, which was a mere woman. It was all such a fucking cliché. How could she ever have dared to think it did not apply?