#writing
The Descent of Pirithous Introduction
Note 8/20/25. I am very proud of the concept of this story. It’s a story about Hubris, though not quite in the way you would expect. In this story, progress is not the enemy, nor is overriding the Gods. The tragic tale of Hubris, conveyed through characters like Icarus, Promethus, Oedipus (and Pirithous) usually follow a “cosmic correcting”, where the mortal weakling abuses their powers, knowledge, or abilities, and ends up being punished and put in their place for their wrongdoing. There is a cosmic order, and it is unfalliable.
In this case, the enemy is not a cosmic order but mans limitation on itself, which is conveyed through the vehicle of a totalitarian religion that might in some regards paralell actual historical events with the Catholic Church. This was done on purpose, but this is not a religious story (indeed, the story is told through the eyes of the faithful), but a story of ignorance and the tall order of stepping out of that “cosmic order”. Religion just happens to be one of those obstacles. By the end of the story (which is not finished), the idea was for the main character to be a sole survivor of a large diving bell, which has now been cut off from the regular world and thrust into the void. The protagonist, who believes himself to freeze or starve to death, achieves a rare visualization of the entire state of the world, when unexplainable (gravity) air currents pull him up through a current of air and debris up above the flat world and back onto it, thus completing a cycle around the entire world that very few humans would ever realize. It is at this moment that he becomes knowledgeable about the far extremes of the world. It is much more beautiful, complex, macroscopic, ethereal, than he or anyone could ever hope to percieve. And yet the people of the world, in their ignorant bickering, fight over tiny scraps when the world itself is so large, presenting a much larger problem of dissection, survival, exploration, and understanding. And this realization does not matter, since the character by this point has tumbled back into the atmosphere, likely meeting a swift and painless end as he hits the ground. (Note, its not the hitting the ground that kills you, but stopping really really fast!) The Hubris thus is a background character, a cthulu-esque flair, horrifying in the best of ways because its not explicit. It’s a paralell to the real world. The real problems we have. Because the universe is big, real big. So what are we doing arguing down here?
I love the concept of this story, but I never finished it, and it leans so heavy into exposition that truly I dislike the actual writing besides a few parts. I hope the spirit shines through nevertheless, and maybe one day I’ll come back to it.