Superabundant existence wells in my heart

some peripatetic thoughts on hell

“Which way I fly is Hell; myself am hell!” cries Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

For the better part of 2024, I’ve had writer’s block and artist’s block, and the thought of being home alone typing on a rainy winter’s night fills me with anticipated loneliness and the sensation that my chest is a clenched fist. I like to imagine myself as urbane, but in reality my face is adorned with pimple patches and I am listening to the crunchy chants of Krishna Das because the emptiness of my apartment (metonym for my soul) is terrifying.

Nietzsche wrote that “the path to one’s own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one’s own hell.” I remember looking up the word “enfer,” which was defined in the French English Dictionary as “hell (an uncomfortable situation).” I love that parenthetical statement. It says so much about the impersonal, hyperbolic nature of the mind. This hell I am experiencing – whether it be losing someone dear to me or the dissolution of an ideal or some other psychic abortion – is just an uncomfortable situation. No need to add concentric circles of hell by unskillfully picking at my literal and figurative pustules.

I spent the afternoon reading Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places, by James Hollis. The cover has a handy litany of universal chthonic feelings to find refuge in:

For Christmas, my brother gave me a photo album of pictures he found when he was clearing out my dad’s house in 2022. I spent the rest of the day in tears. How did I get here? In the confused chronology in which life is experienced, wasn’t I eleven years old the day before yesterday? And wasn’t my dad cremated just a few months after his unexpected diagnosis? And isn’t it urgent that I start living my own life and inhabiting this meatsack before I, too, return to dust?

It is a privilege to cry honest tears; it is a privilege to let go of something beautiful and meaningful and utterly – write it! – irreplaceable. In the Ninth Duino Elegy, Rilke writes, “Your most sacred tenet is Death the intimate Friend… Look! I am living…. Superabundant existence wells in my heart.” To grieve fully is to remain in my body, to stay with the uncomfortable situation, to not shutter the formidable wound with a mindless palliative. To honor Death and loss as my intimate Friend. To insist on being here for the full catastrophe – and eucatastrophe – of life. With the velocity of a constipated earthworm, I let go and let go and let go.