Antony's Inferno

9 Circles of Hell

 

I recently listening to a dramatic rendering of Dante's Inferno, and it got me thinking. 

How in touch am I with fragility and pain?  This is Antony's Inferno, a modern update.

"Why do you sit there, outside the Shanghai Moon?"

I enter the restaurant, acknowledging my discomfort. 

"There is your cardboard coffee cup and discarded sandwich wrappers. Someone's looked after you, but what is this to me?' 

"Yes, I come here to eat and drink excessively. The luxury of a restaurant,  but what is that to you?"

In Sheffield we visited a Wagamama where a waiter serving us had such a hideous skin disfigurement.  He was clearly excellent at his job, but the terror of seeing him.... Just his skin.  The mental image seared frightful images on my brain.  I resolutely thought that here there was a manager with fine principles.  "Accept my staff or don't come here at all."  One day will I return?  Can I swallow my cognitive pain?

When I was younger, someone threw a brick through the window of an Indian Restaurant.  How was I to respond?  I posted a card through the door declaring how this incident upset me.  Was I making assumptions?  My brother questioned my motives.  More thoughts to contend with.

Every year of my life in the NHS I have undertaken mandatory training.  It's the most important part of my job.  Every year I recall the ratio of breaths to heart compressions.  The only time I may have needed this training occurred long before I joined the NHS.  I was queuing for a bus at Victoria coach station.  An elder woman fell forwards into me and slumped to the floor.  Quickly people around seemed to know what to do.  Wonderful, alive, people; angels.  They pumped at her chest, they pulled at her clothes.  I could see that woman was no longer alive.  Her belly began to swell with air.  

Later, as the bus slowly snaked through the southern boroughs of London, I thought of a lonely flat.  The flat that this woman would not return to.  In one moment, the value of her possessions will have slumped, just as she did.  Value is in the mind and heart.  To love something is to give it value.  To love someone; the same.  Without love nothing is of value.  

I was visiting my grandmother.

By the way, I've visited Diss on the southern border of Norfolk.  I not sure why Dante too such exception to it. He placed it in the sixth circle of hell.  Today I heard on the radio that there is a major steam music festival happening there this weekend.  I sounded very innocent.