The mark of Descent, whether undertaken consciously or unconsciously, is a newly arrived-at lowliness, associated with water and soul, as height is associated with spirit. "Water prefers low places." The lowliness happens particularly to men who are initially high, lucky, elevated.
They way down and out usually separates the young man from his companion flyers and from their support, and it makes him aware of a depression that may have been living unnoticed in him for years. A mean life of ordinariness, heaviness, silences, cracks in the road, weightiness, and soberness begins.
Our story simply says that after wandering around a while, having no "craft," the young man at last got a job in the kitchen—which is traditionally in the basement—of a castle. The story says that after all the gold fingertips and hair, what is proper next for the man is the whirlpool, the sinking through the floor, the Drop, what the ancient Greeks called katabasis.
There is something more than a little frightening about this Drop. Our ego doesn't want to do it and even if we drop, the ego doesn't want to see it. The sounds in "katabasis," harsh and abrupt, feel right for this trip.
What I am saying, then, is that the next step in initiation for men is finding the rat's hole. The rat's hole is the "dark way," the one that Williams or Haverford doesn't prepare one for, the trip that the upwardly mobile man imagines that only lower-class men take, the way down and out.
When "katabasis" happens, a man no longer feels like a special person. He is not. One day he is in college, being fed and housed—often on someone else's money—protected by brick walls men long dead have built, and the next day he is homeless, walking the streets, looking for some way to get a meal and a bed. People know immediately when you are falling or have fallen: doormen turn their backs, waiters sneer, no one holds the subway car door for you.
Your inner psychology changes as an old shame surfaces, one walks with head down and feels it's all inevitable. The inner masculine self changes. While one is still grandiose and naïve, a young man lives inside, shiny-faced, expectant, hopeful, dandified, a prince. After the Descent begins, an old man takes place of the prince. To one's amazement a helpless, anti-social, brittle, isolated derelict takes over.
We remember Oedipus in his katabasis: one day an arrogant, demanding king, the next a blind man led around by others. These days, katabasis comes through addiction—alcohol, cocaine, crack. The man loses his health and ends up with thin legs, flat energy, deprived of wife and children, deprived of friends, house, money. He loses his job, self-respect, "and every mark of his former art and life."