(This originally appeared in my novel: LIVE NUDE GIRLS)
Bella may be crazy but she did get me thinking. Hell is only Hell because we know that it’s HELL. So how better to disguise it than by making it look like the EARTH. Or so I concluded one night in my dorm room with raging ADHD-fueled insomnia at 4 am. Check it out…
Let’s say that we die and we end up in the Underworld and there’s this sign on the gate that says “Welcome to Hell” and “Arbeit Macht Frei” and there’s Satan with his pitchfork and fire and brimstone and the damned roiling in pools of molten lava... Well, you’re in HELL, right? We’ve seen the brochures. But the thing about pain and suffering is that you eventually grow inured. The predictability of Hell, in the traditional sense, would make it less than effective as a form of punishment. I mean, if we’re damned to Hell and things are shitty... “Crap! No hot water!” “Hey, whadaya expect? Hell, right?” “Yeah. My bad.” And in Hell there’s no hope of release, even for good behavior. So with nothing to hope for even hellfire would be something we’d get used to. True torment comes when one still holds on to hope. So with this in mind, the Evil Deceiver created Hell on Earth. Think of our lives: we have good days, good months, good years even when suddenly out of nowhere shit happens. We get fired, we get cancer, somebody dies, and we recall the times that were good and we wonder if we’ll ever see them again. And meanwhile we look around and there are all these people who don’t have cancer, who are rich and famous with beautiful wives and husbands and their own Learjet for Christsake! The contrast is what makes our own suffering acute. Why me? Whereas in HELL we’re all in it together. Misery loves company, right? So while I’m burning for my sins everybody else is burning for theirs. But on Earth we’re each of us alone. And the suffering, it’s so arbitrary. The innocent are senselessly slaughtered as others go blithely about their lives, and this makes the bad things that happen seem so much worse because they appear to be utterly random and undeserved. But that’s exactly the point! We’ve all died, see? We lived on Earth and did bad things and we were damned to Hell and sent here. And that’s the genius of it! The illusion that this is all we’ve ever known. What better way to inflict suffering upon someone than to have them believe that this is their life, that they haven’t died at all but are very much alive and that this world is the planet Earth, a place of hope and possibilities! This is the crux of it, because it’s the spaces between the torments that make them so effective. True torture is made up of torment followed by an absence of torment, in an endless repetition, juxtaposed against a backdrop where we perceive others to be better off than we are. Sound familiar? If I left my house today and got mugged I would think it was terrible. But of course it doesn’t happen every day. It’s the unusualness that makes it seem so bad, especially since nobody else I know got beat up today. Why did the world single me out? But if you knew this was HELL you’d say to yourself, “Figures.” The problem is a matter of perspective. So when that bastard cuts me off and that guy at the copy place is rude and I get fucking Leukemia, instead of complaining I’ll say, “Is that the best you can do?” It’s all part of the torment, personalized to make it seem as if it’s ours alone, while everybody else goes around thinking the same damn thing. God’s a frickin’ genius! I mean, I always thought this fire and brimstone stuff was a bit one-dimensional. But this... the world, all of history, the great men and women, their achievements, their triumphs and failures, and each of us with our individual lives, our personal histories. So much intricate detail, but all of it an illusion created by the Evil Deceiver to complete this vast mural of HELL. Think of the work that went into creating it. Incredible. It makes The Matrix look sophomoric. This is a God I can respect, a God I can believe in.
And this explains other things as well. Like why are there so many lousy books and movies that become bestsellers and blockbusters? ANSWER: to frustrate the starving artists. And if you’re a good person and you wonder why bad things happen to good people... Well, to fuck you up! Duh! And besides, you’re not that good since you’re in Hell, capiche? If you take the Earth at face value then most things are downright incomprehensible. But if you reframe your thinking... If you see that this isn’t Earth at all but HELL then everything makes sense. And instead of being absurdly cruel it seems almost comical because you’re finally let in on God’s inside joke.
“How was your day?”
“The usual. Flames of woe. Eternal damnation.”
“Ha! Me too…”
[in unison] “Bor-ing!”
In Hell, hope is what crowns our suffering. So we therefore must believe that we are mortal and our lives are finite. And if we live to be 97 we’ll want to maximize our pleasure and minimize our pain. And even if our life is full of suffering we have the hope in an afterlife where our pain and suffering will be vindicated. So we “die” here in Hell only to come back again as a “new” person, to suffer all over again in a new and unique way, which of course is unknown to us and all part of our punishment, on to Infinity. It’s the mother of all conspiracies. And the first thing to do, as far as I can see, is get rid of hope.
But then again, what would we do without it?
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