A TRIP TO HELL
2021, and the year starts with some great hope of getting a vaccine after the devastating loss of lives because of the pandemic. The covid-19 virus has sucked all our friends, foes, and relatives into its unforgiving horrid venomous womb.
This made my mind wander into the world of oblivion, a world of absurdity, a world that made no sense-a trip to hell. I could hear my bones and every ounce of my breath asking the same question. What is hell? What does it look like? Who will be our torturer? Will it have some uniformed furniture and beautifully painted walls?
COVID-19, the unseen and untamed animal that came like Jesus from the Bible stories. Many have shed tears, lost hope, anguished by the feeling of being alone and others becoming orphans within a blink of an eye. In the midst of all that, blood thirsty politicians in some middle-class countries decided to loot the very cash that was meant for those who had lost jobs to the pandemic. If this does not count as hell, then how does hell look like?
Google dictionary defines hell as a place regarded in various religions as a spiritual realm of evil and suffering, often traditionally depicted as a place of perpetual fire beneath the earth where the wicked are punished after death.
Wikipedia further defines hell as an afterlife location in which evil souls are subjected to punitive suffering, often torture, as eternal punishment after death.
A place of evil and suffering-this made me rush to the horrid incidents at my aunty’s house; she would ensure we stayed outside at lunchtime while my cousins would secretly eat their lunch to their relish and later bubbly come outside to play with us after they had filled their little tummies pretending that they did not what had happened. They played with vigor while we struggled to move our flimsy, weak limbs due to abject hunger. My mind termed that act-evil-and that house-a place of emotional suffering. The evil from that woman became worse, and we later avoided that home-a scourge.
I met this author on my journey to researching literary works based on the Theatre of absurd. He astonished me by the way he saw hell.
He believed that hell is other people and not this place depicted as a place of perpetual fire beneath the earth. He believes that humans subject each other to crude judgments and submerge each other into the world of torture by their inhuman acts. He believes that everything is subjective rather than objective.
Then this means that we can be free. Free from so many beliefs and free to make choices of whether to live in hell or not. Free to choose to mingle with people that don’t make us feel like we are living in perpetual suffering or in shackles of bondage or make us experience the wildfires of perpetual hell.
This also means that we should not objectify ourselves. We should not see ourselves in regards to how others see us. In this case, if you objectify yourself, then you barricade your freedom. You will most probably create a hell within yourself, and that's the reason why we have many suicides in our society. Social media has made us objectify ourselves. We are no longer free to be just us; we are always in perpetual suffering caused by our thoughts that emanate from what we think of how the society sees in us.
In the play "No Exit" by Jean Sartre, the character Garcin was a war veteran but never went to war because of his concrete personal principles and brute policies. He goes into this room which he calls hell and is met by two other ladies going by the names Estelle and Inez. He keeps on explaining to them the reasons as to why he did what he did while he was alive. Now the problem is, he stops seeing himself as the subject and objectifies himself. Objectifies his life. He starts to look for the approval of his previous actions from these two ladies. The moment you start looking for approval from other people, including society, that's the juncture that you stop subjectifying yourself and you create a realm of mental anguish, torture, and room for ridicule as well as opportunities of low self-esteem.
The moment you give the outside world room and the keys to discerning your path in this precious life, that is the time that you lose your freedom. Then you can not live as yourself, make choices, eat your favorite food, choose your career, decide on your spouse, choose your friends or even choose to forgive yourself. You will have subjected yourself to eternal punishment.
The moment my brothers and I decided not to go see our aunt or visit our cousin’s house that we demarcated as hell; we stopped experiencing the torturous feeling of hell. We became free. Even in those instances when we went a whole day hungry, back in our minds, we knew it was because we lacked food but not because someone denied it to us. We chose other venues to see our cousins, and we achieved our mental freedom.
Estelle, Garcin, and Inez in the play “No Exit” by Jean Sartre keep feeling the need to explain to each other about their horrendous actions when they were alive, and continue to seek approval of the reasons for their horrible actions throughout the play. It's this process of objectifying themselves and other characters objectifying them that creates their realm of torture; their hell.
So what is hell? Who is termed as hell?
Hell is other people.
More sources:
Flynn, Thomas, “Jean-Paul Sartre”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/sartre/>.
“Sartre: ‘Hell Is Other People’ EXPLAINED | Philosophy & Psychoanalysis.” You Tube, uploaded by Thoughts on Thinking, 12 Aug. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzElSvvKQWI.
Richey, Tom. “Hell Is Other People (Jean-Paul Sartre / No Exit / Existentialism).” You Tube, uploaded by Tom Richey, 15 May 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J6U7eGGoVg&t=320s.
The Book of Two Ways (Book of the Ways of Rosetau)
The Book of Amduat (Book of the Hidden Room, Book of That Which Is in the Underworld)
The Book of Gates
The Book of the Dead (Book of Going Forth by Day)
The Book of the Earth
The Book of Caverns