Tag Archives: Hell

Where There is No Vision, the People Perish.

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“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”  Heard this often in my youth and realize now that referred to those who don’t see and understand the world as I did at that time.  There is vision and then there is “vision” and learning this lesson requires as step one, realizing that at very best we “see” through a glass darkly.  To put that in more human terms, we “see” only in accordance to a deep-seated need to “see” the world that we are accustomed to.  For example, in my youth in the state of Arkansas, I clearly saw that “Negroes” were not as intelligent and virtuous as were white people.  “It is obvious,” I’m sure I told myself.  What I failed to understand then is the dictate from my culture which mandated that I saw “Negroes” in this way and that seeing them in such a manner fulfilled my personal and tribal need to have someone that was beneath me on the social ladder; they were “the other” in my early life.  The irony of that was that my family was close to the bottom of the ladder itself the first decade or so of my life when those values were being imprinted.

Obtaining vision requires a capacity for paradox, realizing that we see only when we realize that we don’t see, that we see “only through a glass darkly.”  This paradoxical capacity introduces us to the experience of “the other” and awareness of our existential loneliness.  We are all very much alone in this world and it is only through the illusions of cultural contrivance, the object world, that we can superficially connect with others and pretend that we have connection.  And this “pretense” serves a very useful function in this very necessary world of appearance; but it is only when we venture beneath the surface, beyond the pretenses of our persona, and flirt with what W. H. Auden described as the, “unabiding void,” that we can enter the meaningful realm of spirit in which a more genuine connection is possible.  You might even say that our tippy-toeing near or into the void, “scares the hell of us”….or it least it can…as hell is living one’s whole life on the surface, failing to answer the famous question of Jesus, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul; or, what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

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AN AFTERTHOUGHT — What prompted this post is a story in The Economist about the state of Oklahoma and its egregious lack of vision.  Their “lack of vision” so closely parallels the obscurantism of the Republican Party in my country. Here is a link to that story:

https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21736102-low-teacher-pay-and-severe-budget-cuts-are-driving-schools-brink-whats-matter

A Mean-Spirited Poem about Hell

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BUT MEN LOVED DARKNESS RATHER THAN LIGHT

The world’s light shines, shines as it will,

The world will love its darkness still.

I doubt though when the world’s in hell,

It will not love its darkness half as well.

Now I don’t know anything about Richard Crashaw but I hope he was merely having a bad day when he penned this short poem.  Perhaps his wife had burnt the toast that morning, or perhaps she was neglecting her “conjugal duties”, or perhaps his neuro-transmitters were merely screwing around with him.  But this is a nasty, mean-spirited poem.

Now the “concept” of hell exists in world culture and I don’t doubt that hell exists.  But I’m no longer sure about its precise nature or when and where it takes place.  I do feel strongly that those who are most obsessed about condemning others to hell, and emphatic about the point, are pretty much already there themselves.

And those ugly mean-spirited preachers who shriek and scream their sermons about hell’s torments, scaring their children into “getting saved” when they have no idea what they are doing,  simultaneously guilting the adults into “Christian” piety, have no idea just how close they are to hell’s torments.

C. S. Lewis’ Hell & Paul Bowles’ “The Sheltering Sky”

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In my last posting I discoursed re boundaries and love, noting that everything that passes as love is not necessarily love if scrutinized carefully. Boundaries get easily confused and often we aren’t loving our “lover” or “loved one” but merely loving ourselves projected onto that person. As I said, quoting Auden, “Suppose we love not friends or wives but certain patterns in our lives,” the other person being merely a “pattern” that fulfills some need of ours.

As a result some awfully convoluted, twisted, enmeshed, disgusting relationships get hatched and, per C. S. Lewis, often end up with both parties writhing in the hell that was initiated on earth with one person’s possessive love and the other person’s lack of the wherewithal to escape. Yes, ultimately the responsibility is mutual.

Paul Bowles anecdotally illustrated such a relationship between a mother and son in his excellent novel, The Sheltering Sky. The novel, and the movie bearing the same title, portrays the two as reprehensible, disgusting, and ugly human beings. Eric, the adult son, is his aging mother’s traveling companion and is accustomed to the various and sundry indignities that go with this role. He is, among other things, her “step and fetch it” and can never do anything right. She scolds him for not being able to stand on his own two feet but he musters up the courage at one point and fires back, “But you sabotage any effort I make to become independent.” Bowles describes her as very lonely and noted that the only way she had to engage with the world was to be hostile and disputatious, especially with the hapless Eric, but with the whole world. These two characters epitomize the mother-son dyad confined to hell in C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce.