Hell and Death

As this is Party Conference season, I though it a good moment to reflect a little on Hell (a place which we have been discussing elsewhere on this site) . I have stopped attending the party conferences, because I no longer see any point in doing so. I’ll get on to the Infernal regions in a minute or two, but first a word about those conferences.

 

Partly,  I’m put off by the intrusive ‘security’ now required. Months before the event, the would-be attender must submit a vast form, not unlike a visa application to a particularly suspicious foreign country, including personal references, and great masses of intimate information which I would myself prefer not to give to anyone at all. What happens to it all? It’s perfectly obvious that people like me aren’t terrorist threats, and have attended many of these events before quite harmlessly, yet there’s the same rigmarole, over and over again, and then when you get there you have to shuffle through sheds, tediously emptying your pockets into trays and being screened for weapons and explosives. It’s excessive. It wouldn’t, in fact, have prevented the main terror outrage perpetrated against such a gathering, the planting of a timed bomb in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, long before the Tory conference took place.

 

But these things are a ratchet. Like the absurd gates in Downing Street, once they’re there, no bureaucrat will ever support their removal. Anything which then happened would be his fault.

 

I tend to think that the people are in much more danger from terror than the politicians are, and that the risk is exaggerated for all of us. It’s horrible when it happens, but the chances of it happening to any individual are tiny, and the chances are also that, as terror is based on surprise, our precautions will not have anticipated the next outrage. By making our lives in general less convenient, more stifled and surveilled, we have gained very little and lost a lot.

 

It’s a pretext for giving more power to the police and the state, and more contracts to private security firms, and it’s dispiriting and  frustrating to have to submit to it (not even daring to laugh) as the price of flying anywhere, or going to these gatherings.

 

But at least flying does actually get you somewhere you want to go. The conferences are a nowhere destination, scrubbed of normal human beings, cut off from normal life, usually in buildings with even less charm than airport terminals. 

 

If you dare to leave, to go and visit the (often attractive) towns and cities in which these events take place then you must queue up to be searched to get back in again. So most people stay put.

 

There are periodic mob events, in which the media, in their sheep-like way, get excited by a leak or a speech, as the spin-doctors intend them to do.  But for the rest it might as well be a trade fair for the manufacturers of grommets. I know plenty of people who attend these entire events without once entering the hall in which supposed ‘debates’ are taking place. I always made a point of trying when I used to go, but the deathly, abandoned air of these futile discussions is almost enough to make me lose the will to live. I also find the business of meeting politicians increasingly lowering. Almost all seem to have been taken over by some sort of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, which has deprived them of the ability to think. There are one or two exceptions, but they don’t offset the general effect.

 

So not Hell, but perhaps Limbo, or maybe Purgatory.

 

As to Hell, what is it? I joked, in my book ‘the Abolition of Britain’, that Roy Jenkins had probably abolished it one unseasonably hot afternoon in the mid-1960s, slipping the Infernal Regions (Closure) Bill past a somnolent House of Commons. But it wasn’t entirely a joke.

 

Hell exists, first of all, in the human mind.  There’s a John Wyndham short story in which a number of people arrive in what appears to be Hell  (by London Underground train, I think) and simply mock it out of existence by refusing to believe in it.

 

You can see what he was driving at there. But I find the images of hell in art rather worrying, even so.The effect on me of Rogier van der Weyden’s ‘Last Judgement’ in the Hotel Dieu in Beaune , which I describe in my book ‘The Rage Against God’ is an example of this. As a child, I was particularly troubled by a small painting by Wlliam Blake called 'the Simoniac Pope', not because I planning to be Pope, or even knew what Simony was (I looked it up) but because it was so ferocious.

 

In the small Buckinghamshire village of Penn, once the home of the (atheist) novelist Elizabeth Taylor (whose rather good books and stories are now coming back into fashion), the church contains a famous painting of the Last Judgement, known as ‘The Penn Doom’. Visitors may study it by turning on a light . On a plaque by the switch are the words ‘For Doom, press switch’, which caused me to hestitate before doing so. There’s another fairly ferocious Doom in the church of St James the Great in South Leigh, near Witney, and some of the windows in Fairford Church ( one of the most astonishing collections of stained glass in the world) are downright frightening to contemplate, A lot of people actively dislike them. I’m not so sure.

 

What are they telling us? Do such creatures await us on the other side of the dark tunnel that is death? It’s funny how the conception persists. M.R.James, in his matchless ghost stories, produces a variety of hellish creatures which somehow escape, or are rashly summoned by people who don’t know what forces they are playing with,  into the Edwardian world of cathedrals and Oxbridge colleges of which he writes.

 

It’s there in the Sistine Chapel roof. It’s in Hieronymus Bosch. Dante provided a sort of Baedeker's Guide, with maps and pictures. There’s a Tintin book in which the villains, in the course of drowning, find themselves suddenly surrounded by small red demons, shoving their forks into them. In the extremely popular film ‘Ghost’, terrifying cowled shapes appear from the depths, accompanied by a hideous noise,  to drag away the damned to a destination that is plainly not going to be fun.   One of the most disturbing demons in art is (I think) in the Groeninge Museum in Bruges (or Brugge, as we ought to call it, if we’re going to call Peking ‘Beijing’). It shows Judas, fleeing from the Last Supper to complete his betrayal. He is looking back at Our Lord and so does not see that he is rushing into the clawed embrace of a hideous, staring,  beaked creature.  No explanation or background is offered by the gallery.  Then there are various forms of the Faust legend, or other diabolical temptation, enjoyably retold in modern times by Alan Judd, that interesting writer, in his book  ‘The Devil’s own Work’.

 

'Room 101', in 'Nineteen Eighty Four'is also a form of hell, because it is always the thing the victim fears the most. The Thought Police have got into his head, like demons, and found this out,  in each case. That is why we all know what is in there.

 

C.S. Lewis created Screwtape, a devil who plots the subtle corruption of nice English middle-class people, and went a good deal further than that in his so-called ‘Science Fiction Trilogy’. Mick Jagger suggested sympathy for the old gentleman. Stephen Vincent Benet introduced him to New England in that alarming story ‘the Devil and Daniel Webster’, in which a jauntily-bearded , witty and jesting Satan (known locally as ‘Scratch’) collects souls and keeps them, like fluttering moths, in his pocket-book. You can here their tiny voices crying to be let out.  A rather good film was made of this, if you like that sort of thing. I t ends, as many good films do, with a jury trial. But what a jury.  

 

And then of course there’s Ira Levin’s clever book ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, brilliantly filmed by, well, I never, Roman Polanski, in which the horned devil actually appears in modern New York City.

 

Well, I’ve met no such person, but I’ve seen, or learned in detail about, plenty of diabolical actions by humans, which are in their way quite as terrifying as the clawed, implacable monster of darkness which artists have produced out of their minds. These are the things we do when we (and this of course includes many religious people who wrongly imagined they had a warrant to be cruel) ignore the moral absolutes which we have been given. It’s amazing how quickly we can descend into cruelty,  when we think we’re authorised to inflict it, as the Stanford Prison Experiment showed, I think , quite conclusively.

 

 

And it’s been my view for many years that hell can be (and often is) glimpsed in a human face (sometimes our own) in the midst of an act of cruelty or selfishness, in some kinds of laughter and in some sorts of silence as well.

 

As to the form that Divine Justice might take, if there is (as I both hope and fear) such a thing, I fancy that human imagination cannot really encompass it. That is why our forebears daubed crude devils on church walls, and also why geniuses such as Bosch and van der Weyden painted their worrying masterpieces. It was partly because they wanted justice, and partly because they feared it. It was also because they all suffered ( as we still do)  from this great and puzzling gap in the human mind – the fact that we are born with a desire for justice, and yet so seldom see justice done in this life. That is the origin of Hell, and the worse the injustice, the deeper and more horrible is the Hell we imagine. Is it there? Don't bank on it not being, or in necessarily being the modern Anglican version, which I gather is a sort of absence.