The Hellacious Comedy

The Fool wants to take Dante’s journey,

but being The Fool he doesn’t realize 

that Dante’s sojourn was literature

whereas The Fool’s experience will be real life.

And so The Fool must follow his heart 

which sends him to Heaven first,

yet real life manifests Heaven on Earth

in ways that can’t help but become Purgatory.

Realizing the fall from the sought ideal

sends The Fool to Hell

where he discovers, the more he yearns for his perfect ideal

the more he will feel equal pleasure and pain.

Mistaking the Shades for his shadow,

The Fool commits to remain in Hell

to do the work and heal all of them

so he may achieve a wholeness of Self

and realize the ideal of individuation.

But every perfect ideal produces equal pleasure and pain,

and so his quest for the ideal Self 

merely ensures the creation of the Anti-Self

who knows no ideal other than 

negation of identity itself.

In the Eternal Void we disappear

and in that instant of surrender

we may transcend both Heaven and Hell.

But the trinity of Self and Anti-Self and The Fool as Himself

cannot be one with The Eternal Void

until a fourth factor is enjoined.

Heaven has a Trinity,

Hell has one too.

Caught in Hell, The Fool realizes too late,

the fourth factor in the ideal quaternary 

was and always will be

his imperfect life of pain, defined by lost ideals,

something that, in his idealism, he can’t embrace.

And his devils laugh and whisper in his ear

to complete his despair,

“Heaven is an ideal, just as Hell,

both produce equal pleasure and pain.

In Hell, pleasure is pain.

In Heaven, pain is pleasure.

The only path to The Eternal Void

is by negating Heaven and Hell and yourself

but as soon as you try for any of these three

you assert a fourth factor – yourself

and thus renews the pain of Being!”

“...as the thing more perfect is,

The more it feels of pleasure and of pain.”  

         – Inferno: Canto VI, The Divine Comedy