Hi, I Just Got Here

cracks&drips
Originally uploaded by revraikes.

There are these points in my life when I really get a joke that I thought was previously sussed. One such occurrence happened while watching a thoroughly disappointing PBS disc from the library that was a discussion by some Harvard intellectuals about the existence of the divine.

The joke was Sartre's statement that hell is other people. On it's face, I took his play (the line is attributed to No Exit) to mean simply that being forced into association with humans rather than being solitary or in nature was excruciating. I often hold this sardonic view the further I collude with my fellow humans.

Through the heady discourse of the program in question, the ponderous pontificators stumbled over, around & roundly away from the pith of the matter, i.m.h.o. They split hairs and avoided the obvious. To the point of this post, a major facet they couldn't peg was that of humanity's universal need for the big cosmic truth, e.g. why we keep trying to plug our 110v adapter into the giant 220v outlet in the sky.

To me, it seems that our (the Western reality-tunnel at least) drive to label every little thing in the multi-verse drives us further from our inherent knowledge that we are not really separated from any one particle in existence. The desire then lay in the wish to reconnect with the collective consciousness, humans being an appendage of that entity. The desire itself is illusionary since the aforementioned reasoning presupposes disconnect.

Whether Sartre intended this meaning or not, I am co-opting it. The conclusion and more poignant joke is that the hell exists in believing that there is anything other than oneself. Hell is other people because I am all (and vice versa...I don't want to start another Nietzsche horror show).

Now we can all let loose a restrained chortle while darting our eyes to & fro to make sure no one sees us check our ivy-league comb-overs.
Round Table adjourned.
[faw faw faw echoes down the hallowed halls]