See you in Hell, neighbor
A frozen swimming pool in Macungie, PA, February 2024
One year ago, my grandfather died.
Eighty-nine years old.
A life marked by fear.
No funeral.
The slow demolition of St Laurentius Church, February 2023
He was a “born-again” Christian, after having numerous mental breakdowns in and out of institutions, then separating from the Catholic church, and raising his children and grandchildren to fear the inevitability of Hellfire and suffering unless we too accepted Christ as our personal saviors. From an early age, he would lecture me on Hell. He was compelled to tell me how awful it is, how I deserve it if I do not love God in the right way, with the right words. He would describe the most unbearable suffering, that every cell, every atom of my existence would burn and suffer and weep for eternity.
While I quickly shed any religious beliefs in my adolescence and early adulthood, the sense of discomfort and doom has never passed. I have a hard time letting myself be comfortable, and unfortunately sometimes make others uncomfortable out of a perpetual sense of guilt and shame. After a long life never before leaving his childhood home in Binghamton, NY, a series of unfortunate events deposited my grandfather and grandmother in my late-aunt’s house in Macungie, PA before he was checked into memory care just a few months before passing. I did not see him between 2009 and my aunt’s funeral in 2021, and in that time all of his religiosity had vanished into dementia, but his fear of death and a living Hell remained. It’s strange to see someone who inspired so many nightmares lose his edge, but maybe that’s for a different entry.
Frayed US and Pride flags, October 2024 (These flags have since been taken down).
It is hard not to look at the state of the world now without recognizing some aspect of Hell. Perhaps Hell has always been on earth, after all, how else would we imagine the worst of the worst without experiencing terrible things. I think it’s getting clearer that we live in it here in the United States. We are witness to increasing climate disasters, genocides that persist despite the most coordinated activist and resistance efforts, and we have once again fallen into fascism and chaos in the first ten days of the second Trump presidency. The rights of many are in jeopardy for the wanton privilege, greed, and hatred of few despots.
Quintuple Exposure, Late October or Early November 2024
Everything is terrible and chaotic and it is hard to imagine where we go from here that isn’t irrevocably changed for the worse. We live in Hell. The systems and institutions we grew up with are collapsing. If we let it, this world is ready to fall into barbarism if it hasn’t already.
We live in a world that dirties our hands by living in it. One cannot participate in the material realities of this world without being sucked into the muck of complicity for some terrible thing. We live within totalizing systems that excise as much value and profit from whatever it calls a resource, including ourselves. We are all made to bear witness to atrocity or to look away in ignorance.
In the early aughts, Harold Camping, the evangelist leader of Family Radio, predicted that the rapture would happen on May 21st, 2011 and the rest of us would be doomed to Hell. Camping was surprised when nothing noticeable happened that day, or at least that he himself did not get called. But maybe he was right, but only a few were taken unnoticed. The rest of us remained to watch the spinning plates of the world start to falter and fall.
Broken Plate, October 2023
But Hell is just a concept, further, it is envisioned as a suffering only for oneself as part of the masses. We are taught to fear Hell in its loneliness. We are not alone. We’re better off as a community of co-sufferers than to see ourselves only in terms of our personal relationship with suffering. To suffer is often a lonely experience, but we are not here alone. We are neighbors in Hell. We must learn to commiserate and resist in whatever ways we can, even if it is just stealing away moments of joy. We must learn to live in Hell, together and for each other.
The aims of this blog are simple; I am looking to get some words and pictures out. It won’t always be political, but if you know me, you know that it will stay cynical.
