Pick Up the Stick!
A Description of Hell.
(The following is an older piece of writing. I lost my other account and put it here to preserve it. It has been unchanged to maintain it’s authenticity.)
Oct 4, 2018
A Description of Hell.
When you get to hell — and let’s be real, that’s where you and I both are headed — tell me what you think of the devil. Is he some goat-headed behemoth devouring the souls of the evil? I don’t think he will be. I think the prince of darkness will match his description in Dante’s Inferno: a self concerned, giant demon-baby, wallowing in his own self pity. He’s stuck in a lake of ice, and flapping his wings around in a temper tantrum that only further freezes it. He’s caught in an eternal cycle of flagellation that I find eerily familiar to my situation and many of my peers: each of us stuck in our own lake of ice, brooding.
What I love most about Inferno and Dante’s entire Comedia is it’s central message: to get to heaven, you have to go through hell. There are no shortcuts, just one direct and painful path, right down the devils mouth (and literally out of his asshole) and up the worlds deadliest mountain. If you’ve ever created or achieved anything worthwhile, anything that was remotely close to the perfect version of it in your imagination, I think you would agree with me that that the above is a suitable description for how the experience felt.
I do not believe in heaven or hell, but I do believe that Dante wrote the most true inquiry into human psychology that the world has. I believe that even though heaven does not exist, that when I am at my best I am trying to get there because I know that evil is not what I had been taught to believe it is. I think most of us would picture evil as some manifesting and opposing force, something like an army or cruel dictator. But we know that every villain is the hero of his own story, and that both sides in any conflict always believe that theirs is the most justified, that is why they are fighting.
That is not evil. It’s good intentions and miss-understanding about how to achieve them. Pure evil is a much more passive and insidious force. It creeps in on you, swallowing you while you are blissfuly unaware, until you too are like the Devil and all the other souls of the tortured in hell: Miserably comfortable.
Comfort is the most interesting aspect of hell in my opinion, and it is comfort that is keeping me here. Despite the barbaric torture many of the guests of hell endure: it is clear that all of them are comfortable there. That all of them are too wrapped up in their own self pity to see that if they could just change, just stop feeling sorry for themselves, then they too could make that daunting climb to the bottom of hell, through it and out of it. But sitting in their familiar torture is easier than making an effort to escape.
Why This Matters
The reason I am saying this at all is because I have been noticing hell-like behavior most of the people around me. In my coworkers and in my friends. We are are all fucking terrified of the journey we must embark on if we are ever going to get to that lifestyle we have dreamed about since we were children. I know that sounds cheesy, but fuck anybody who thinks that cheesy is a bad thing. If we are more than just our bodies, if we are more than a mundane series of chemical and electrical reactions contained within a skin bag, then we are our dreams, we are our passions, and we are the sacrifices of bodily comfort that we take to get there.
Again, I am not a religious person, however I think that this is what Jesus means by denying the flesh. Not the prude “don’t masturbate” version we got from our parents, but a more abstract and more true reading of that adage. That if you want to inherit “The kingdom of the Lord” (whatever that means for you,) then you are going to have to abstain from certain immediate pleasures in the here and now. If you want that hot body, stop eating so much cheese and candy. If you want that Ph.D get off of Netflix and pick up a fucking book. If you want to learn that second language, move to the goddamned country where they speak it, make friends with the people and start fucking learning.
This post was inspired by my uncle who called me to wake me up from this stupor of a self pitying dream I have put myself in. I am a writer, or I want to be one, although I haven’t been posting to medium or searching for places to pay me for my work. I feel that same self doubt, the same fear of doing the bravest thing of all which is to believe in myself, that so many of my peers have, that all the people in that river of fire have. They see the exit to hell. And while all of them have the ability to get out, to step out of the torture and just escape it, they don’t.
OK, I’m starting to lose the goose here, I need to get back on track.
You don’t need “this” to get “that”
I was talking with my uncle from Wilmington, N.C., who had just escaped hurricane Florence (Same town Dante was born in). He told me to come out to see him, and I told him that I would love to, I just needed to save a little bit of money to get there.
He called me up and told me that I was too fucking smart. Too smart to be treating myself like a zoo animal in my parents house. Comfortably fed, but without the ability to roam anywhere. He told me that my mindset was fucked up. He told me that his nephew was too fucking smart to ever believe that he needs “this” to get “that”. “If you want something” he told me “Just go fucking get it.”
He asked me how much money I was saving up for. What was the dollar amount that I needed to get to in order to move out? I told him I didn’t know. Where was I going to move to when I moved out? and Who was I going to live with? Again, I told him that I didn’t know. He didn’t need to say much more after that. His point was clear. I had no plan, so if I was waiting for a day when I had enough of “this” to get “that”, the day was never going to come.
Pick Up The Stick
He told me about his life. How he dropped out of college to take a job at Porsche. How he left that Job to move to California, (knowing nobody) to try and get on TV. How after he got on TV he wouldn’t stop until he got my aunts number. and through all of it he told me he was hungry. That I had to get too hungry to even be afraid. To get to a point that if you succumb to fear, then you don’t eat.
Just because I am part of the most recent generation of college graduates does not indicate that this issue applies especially to us. Dante wrote his Comedia 700 years ago! These issues are ones that have plagued our parents, and their parents and so forth. We are so often told that our generation was told that we could be anything, and so we expect something for free. Maybe that’s true. But even if it is true, focusing on it will not help us escape the hell we are putting ourselves in. The only escape, as my uncle told me, is to pick up the stick.
Just pick up the fucking stick, and put it down, he told me. Don’t spend any time thinking “is there a better way to pick up this stick?” “How many sticks can I pick up at once?” “Am I wasting my time picking up sticks?” No. Just pick up one stick, move it over there, and put it down. That task is done. It doesn’t matter if you could have done a better job at it. It doesn’t matter how many people are also picking up sticks. Just focus on yours.
