understand hell.
we've all heard about that hot inferno red poker spiked middle earth torture chamber, so let's offer that description as one possible image of hell, but add as variants, for this thought experiment, the following:
a) hell is the current world, but with no coffee and no music or cinema and definitely no wine, a place where one is constantly running late, and and wearing too-tight shoes, without end
b) hell is the current world, except that every time anyone's mouth moves all that comes out of it is of diaper rash, politics, the cost of gasoline, the random activities of second-cousins, odd weather patterns, previous ski vacations, cable company "issues", and high school pranks, without end
c) hell is the current world, but a world with only bad writing and one is being constantly bored, or the opposite, ---to be condemned to only reading a stream of beautiful writing that makes one wish to kerosene one's own keyboard and throw away the pen
d) hell is here and now, and is such that one can confidently state that on average, its normal is "good enough".
***
choose one hell. got it?
now picture deciding to walk away. picture deciding, and executing.
how'd that work out for you?
yeah. the utter panic and vision of walking away is easier to imagine with some definitions than with others: for example, departure from the middle earth would definitely be difficult, even with a shovel or an accommodating and discrete elevator man, i'll give on that. look at what happened to orpheus and eurydice. we can't even rely upon our surface earth peeps--our most devoted of still-living lovers willing to gamble their very souls for us, to be secure in us---try finding one reliable stranger guy in hell to help out. i imagine that the hedonistic, greedy for instant gratification,
and i think everyone could agree that options a, b, and c are all nightmares that would be difficult to leave because implied in the statement itself is that the entire world is like that, so where would you go? those were trick options. and you thought d was the trick option, didn't you? because of those words, "good enough".
perhaps because of the five options given, in which only one can, in reality, loom as a threat--(i have no evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that lead me to believe any of the first four variables could even be)--my mind dismisses the other four rather efficiently. but that aside, i do find that the good enough life, the one many don't even consider at all when asked to imagine unpleasantness in extreme, is the slipperiest, stickiest, most trappifying Hell of them all. remember that there is no way out at all of the first four hells. but this good enough thing...this trumps them all, for me.
and this is the wine-dark, the mystery dust or poem inside of us, the thing we don't or can't articulate to anyone. this tiny "ok" hairball is swallowed, accidentally hidden by us, and most dangerously, it is secreted away from ourselves.
so there is nothing to tell, really. no words for no thing to say--it's all fine.
but at some point, our consent or no, words and definitions come together to describe. and it all comes down to which story one wants to tell, really.
pity us.
