Third lap the podcast with Alejandro Gaviría and Ricardo Silva Romero, a podcast of the arroba locutorio. The speaker should assume that you have all the violence inside and all the evil you see outside, you can have it inside and not feel above others. That seems to me to be fundamental and makes me think that perhaps the hell of these times is the absence of compassion. That is, when one sees that there is no compassion for one or that one does
not feel compassion for others, there is hell. It is to lack the capacity to assume the human. This seems interesting because it takes us like some kind of mirror. It' s hell. Metaphorically, it is nothing other than recognizing our ability to do evil. But then winter becomes the other thing, to tell me to understand human nature in its complexity and to attribute that
role of implacable judge. Hi, Ricardo Hi, Alejandro. I want us to talk a little bit before we start with the subject of cooking day, third round of how the issues are made. And we have some kind of implicit agreement, and it' s that we get ready first. Yeah, we didn' t make it or we went on a date. There' s our friend Alexpinilla, and we' re starting to do some sort of brainstorming and we can have a theme because we don' t want to Google, we don' t want to get ready, and we don' t
want this to turn into a uribe of commacherros without talking bad. We think it' s a conversation. It' s a spontaneous conversation. If we don' t come here and say something we' ve thought about before and the conversation is taking on a cafeteria structure. Let' s say more than anything else, so it' s the conversation that almost defines it by lack of structure and free actions. What one is remembering is that current of consciousness
that is taking us from one side to the other. Exactly. We' re always surprised by the themes, except when we' ve had guests. We have no more to prove, that is, of ideas that we are going to hypothesis, that we are going to prove in any way rather we are at the mercy of the memory and the humor of the day. We ' ve already had more than seventy chapters. We' ve talked about all the issues. There are probably ideas that come back yes, but that shows
that conversation, dialogue, is infinite. Many of us can speak here We can stay eternally with Ricardo too, who always accompanies us by talking about conversations. We haven' t turned back. I think there are rumors of other podcasts where people resort to ppactive substances, to a sip. No. No, this has been sober. He' s been sober, but we look
drunk. It' s really amazing. And also, I want to clarify since I say I talk about drunkards, that when I spoke Ricardo, he is not talking about myself in third person of Ricardo Daza, who is ours, our engineer and always is our other companion of these talks. I think Ricardo, who up to here has the accurate and accurate accounting of how many
episodes there are seven, seven is not the number of unimportant fortunes. Yeah, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, no. We are truly proud that having a good time seventy- seven times is a great achievement in life. And today, in that previous conversation to get to the point, we
said we wanted to talk about hell. If we come to that conclusion, I remember a little phrase that I told Jorge Luis Borges that said half in humorous tone, at the end of his life, saying of the final judgment, how it was of all this, follow a judgment already tired of life and he said, and he then said what it seemed to him that heaven and hell were disproportionate, hell as that eternal punishment for the bad ones, or heaven the eternal prize, which were disproportionate, that men said. We
don' t deserve that much. Of course, there is a proportion in this metaphysics, in those promises of the desert. Yes I the one who came to religion, who invented these metaphors a little rough, very strong, and I taught in a school thirty years ago and was almost the age of the students and you tell them and I are always problems. And it seemed to me that it might be interesting because they were classes of 14- year - olds who didn' t want classes of anything, that it was interesting
to structure it with hell, that it was going to be attractive. And then I started reading things from hell among everyone, a story of hell by a guy named George Minois French. And what seemed most interesting to me was the moment that I found interesting that book, it was the moment when hell becomes such a violent, violent and eternal punishment, because there is a stage
of hell, which is the stage before the Catholic Empire. If one wants to see it, on that side, yes, the Catholic hegemony, the Catholic culture, which is the moment of antiquity, in which hell is the place to which the dead are going to give, which is almost a dusty place. Sometimes they imagine it as the Earth, as the center of the earth, as a place full of worms, of things, for breaking down, but it does not have that burden of punishment, of sin and punishment
of the body, of the body, even the body beyond life. That seemed particularly interesting to me. It' s a long book for the subject. There are seven hundred pages and one of going culture by culture, seeing what their hell is like, because it starts to be hard to read. But that' s very interesting, that turn towards punishment and then the contemporary turn of the 20th century, almost that' s when hell starts to be personal, when it' s no longer the same hell for everyone, but
everyone lives their own hell that also has to do with lacking things. Above all, it is hell like human consciousness. One locked in that hell of his own. I find it interesting Richard what you say about hell like that place where the dead go. I haven' t had much contact with the word" hell" in general, now that you' ve spoken. Of that, a hell that I have read about is something related and it is
the hell that is becoming life that does not end eternal life. There' s a little bit of Gulliver' s travels, which I like to quote is over there. Luke Nack Island. There are some guys who are born with a sphere, a red circle in the middle of the forehead, who live blue and gray and live eternally and you see it like it, that is, hell, that your portraits, is a decomposition, a loss of all appetites and in a kind of metamorphossa, it is inverse, a return
to making some chrysalids and you see that they are entering some hell. But it is that, it is that continuity of life, beyond what one considers reasonable, expectable. There are many literary hells in such a way that one thinks, as we have spoken, of dystopian novels or dystopian fictions, which are a very useful metaphor for talking about life on earth. Hells as well
macondo, to say one very close. That is clearly a hell or comala, the hell of Rulfo, of Pedro Páramo and they all come from the hell of Dante, of the Divine Comedy, which is such a literary hell that, as a travel guide, has Virgilio leading forward by the nine circles that, among others, perhaps the funniest thing about that hell is or the most shocking thing that hell is that the worst of those nine circles, that is where people are really burning that they are suffering the most is roasting,
let' s say, it is the circle that deserve those who have betrayed friendship. To me, that always seems impressive to me that it is worse in Dante' s nine circles, the betrayal of friendship is worse than, for example, violence, physical violence, also borges that the history of literature is simply the story of a few recurring metaphors, recurring to the clear common place, and that idea ahead and those hells and concentric circles and that classification
that makes hand in hand almost the paradigm of man of letters. Yes, it is a metaphor. But I also find interesting that idea of traditiating friendship, because, in essence, it is a deviation from the human heart that has no forgiveness, because the first morality is born of reciprocity, yes, it makes of building with those we call friends, a kind of implicit contract that is not written anywhere. It' s the one where we respect each other and I help you and you help me tomorrow and so on. Yeah,
it' s like ripping off a fortune. Not luck is the seed of our ethics. Yeah, totally the ethics center. The center is there and that' s where almost everyone comes out in one a. I liked reading biographies of Baruke Espinosa. It seems to me an interesting character who is well expelled from his community as well because perhaps he did not believe in hell and said that only a commandment matters to love his neighbor. Of course it ' s a bit the same concept. In Dante' s art hell is
the first circle called limbo. The second circle is that of lust, the third gluttony, the fourth of greed, and the fifth of anger. The sixth of heresy. The seventh of the violence, the eighth of the fraud and the ninth of it is betrayal and the worst of the betrayals is the tradition of friendship. Lust what lust is at first. That burns one, but it' s like a microwave, but it' s not that strong. And thinking of Jorges, the aleve has a lot of going down into
hell. In fact, the character that leads to the narrator that one supposes is a sort of borges to see the point where all the two are. To see the alef is a guy named Carlos Argentine Daneri, who is commander Allilleri. There' s allusion to Avila. That journey also his descent into hell, the alef, which is the grace in literature of the theme of hell, the descent to hells that you are so pinocho when it descends into the ocean and brings the dad from the Disney version, from the whale and
in the version of the book from the shark. Of course it' s more of the book It' s a scary thing. The Disney movie is also terrifying, but it' s getting a little better and it' s the exercise like in the eneida or going down to hell and bringing in the neida. It is the golden branch, but the descent of hell is supposed to be really the way of redemption and understanding of the human. It comes back with news about the lives of men that is similar to what Campbell describes
as the hero' s journey. Not exactly, it' s going to a place, transforming to reach your community, transforming it. This idea of the journey to hell makes me connect it with another recurring story or metaphor that I have always liked that there is literature is full of this and it is the needle and fall, and it is good, hell is also on this
earth. Yes, and that story, which is the personal story of many people and especially the people who have lived the most public lives climb up and juven and juven But all that just doesn' t make the descent, the inevitable descent to what becomes a personal hell. She' s a doctor. I' ve always liked it, I' ve always liked ohe and fall seemed to me. Yes, that there is something interesting about that tragic, also that has been a recurring theme in our podcast Ricardo. Yeah, yeah.
And how to deal with the boom and the fall, how to be wise in those two moments that is not easy in either one of us. There, thinking of the 20th century, because that phrase of artre' s play that, if I' m not bad, premiered when the Second War is ending, that is, it comes loaded with all that experience. The famous phrase of hell are the others that at first might sound like the fault of the others, but really, when you review the play, what the
character who is the protagonist is saying is that hell is the others. When one is unable to relate to others, that is, the fault is not of others, but of one. The others are a constant proof that one is incapable of living. It' s a little in that sense and it ' s about boom and fall. Somehow, that play is about how you deal with the lockdown, for example, when these are characters who are locked up and I do think it' s the hell you live in these times.
The falls we all have seem to me in that of the others. Richard is another form of hell, hell on this earth that are the most common. The others are simply human imagination. It' s ostracism. It is not when one is banished and a community is and is pointed out by others and is ethically pointed out what that implies. That' s that banishment,
it' s a form of hell. The others are the hells we have built in search of paradise or heaven, ideologies that have tried to build a paradise on earth, but that have ended on the contrary, turning into the slaughter and hell. The man said I think Aldus Hockley is a strange animal. It kills more by ideological satiety than by hunger. I didn' t stay Yes, I kept thinking about the others and the schism, the
i- lostracism. I kept thinking about that because then it makes me think that this whole culture, for example, of cancellation, is that and has one thing like that there was no moral punishment since Catholic hell. I' ve never taught by some judges who followed themselves a place on their side.
Also, as it is disproportionate, I thought, as we have ever spoken in the human Taint, Philip Rott' s novel, which is the first time that I read something about a cancellation and that it is a novel novel, because in the nineties political correction found its name. They put it there, put it there, the first Bush was the first to talk about political correctness. We' ve talked about this before. But I did keep thinking about ostracism, banishment and how easy it is. Today the other one.
The other day I wrote a column on the issue of Gaza, in favour of the Palestinian State and against the genocide in Gaza, very clearly that there is genocide there, because I believe that is already proven. There were immediately a couple of people saying that was a column justifying the genocide in Gaza. And I found it impressive how all these people who have attributed themselves to the role of judge, who has appointed themselves, because there is no organism,
because they always read them diagonally. They read diagonally because they are already determined to see who they are going to condemn and whom they are not willing to send every day to the exact hell. That' s that relentless look from the others and basically that you ethically judged that it doesn' t belong. If you can' t belong to that community, social media has been overstated. It' s a theme that' s been recurring on our podcast.
It seems rich to me that, in any case, those two concepts of heaven and hell, in the background, are metaphors of our ambivalent nature, which has always been said angels and demons of that dual theme of the human being, that we are able to surrender ourselves to us, but also to betray our friends in which case we would deserve that ninth circle of hell. Yes, that complexity of the human being is the material from which we are ethically so difficult. I think it was Gettel who said there' s no
crime I don' t think I can commit. Of course, we' re on the edge of the us and that' s a look that seems compassionate to me. That is, it is compassionate to assume that you have all the violence inside and all the evil you see outside, you can have
it inside and not feel above others. That seems to me to be fundamental and makes me think that perhaps the hell of these times is the absence of compassion, that is, when one sees that there is no compassion for one or that one does not feel compassion for others, there is hell that is lacking the ability to assume the human. I find this interesting because it takes us like some kind of mirror. It' s hell. Metaphorically, it
is nothing other than recognizing our ability and doing evil. But then winter becomes the other thing, to tell me, to understand human nature in its complexity and to attribute that role. It' s relentless, of course, every day, not in an obsessive way. No mirror. No mirror. The fantasy that hell is the others means literally that or the fantasy that bad guys are the others. I' m impressed with those. Maybe we' ve
already talked about it, but we don' t care anymore. That I am very impressed by the stories, novels and films that are also in the war and that choose as protagonist a child that there is one can think of a novel by a painter named Fredulman, which is called Reencounter, or a film by Luis mal that is called God to children, which was very famous at the end of the eighties and near that moment. Another is called hope
and glory and even the empire of the sun. Those stories of war, the tongue of butterflies told from a child who lives in a village, even bucolic, like in a paradise, in a Eden, and suddenly there come some bad ones and they ruin it and start bombing and they start closing houses, they start ruining what was so beautiful and so pure and they always seemed to me just that trap, the trap of us were good and there came
some villains here and they damaged everything. And that I think it' s to save the social responsibility of having begotten those villains, of having fed them, fattened them with the years and that one day they were the ones who took charge of everything. It seems nice to me that Ricardo had not thought of it, because this innocent look, that innocent look that abstracts that social context totally that shows this duality of the human soul in a more bloody,
complicated, complicated way. We are who we are, yes and not taking responsibility. It also seems to me like a way to preserve hell, to think that everything comes from nothing, that evil is generated spontaneously, that they land the earth from time to time. It seems to me that it is a way of serving hell, not of not resolving matters, of facing the mirror. I think so, the fantasy that you' re part of the
good guys is a big risk. Yeah, hell. Maybe that' s the idea that there' s going to be a relentless judge, who' s going to choose between them. Here' s the good guys. Here are the bad ones, and the bad ones deserve an eternal captigo. If we' ve been reading Mafalda in the house with corinés so she' ll fall asleep, I don' t know why she sounded. That' s
obviously no idea of one. And yesterday we got one of those cartoons, one of those Band- Aids that I remembered, which is that Mafalda is with Manolito, the savage capitalist, who has brush hair, and he is with Felipe, who is like the idealist Bonachón, who tempts out, has gone out and dreams of the lone lanner and is a typical one he likes very well, even Manolito is also authentic. Yeah, that' s all
gross and that' s always a beauty. And what' s better is that Mafalda tells them that society has to get ahead and then Manolito and Felipe almost grab to death because everyone says that forward is to the other side. It' s on the opposite side. So, Manuelita goes ahead is that way and Felipe says no forwards, that way and they start almost killing because the two have a different concept of what it is to get ahead and I
lack it. Then you understand why nothing works, because everyone, as on Twitter, as on the networks the hashtag, we good people are more who use it, the right most scary and the craziest on the other side of the spectrum. It is one proof, that what is lacking is self- criticism, always the ability to make therapy, to analyze oneself and there will always be those opposing visions and we will never fully agree, because human affairs
are assigned by that duality. I would like to end with a related but different subject. It has to do with the first part of the conversation, and it is to emphasize that neither heaven nor hell are eternal and we do not want them to be eternal, neither the one as punishment nor the other as permanent pleasure. There is a small story hidden in a novel by Julian Barns, this British writer, which is used with great connections to French culture.
Also one person goes to heaven and arrives and six months take the sky and the sky is like the best conversations, the best manquets, the best parties. Six months, he' s happy there and some afternoon he finds a crowd of people in the sky around an aparatic where there' s a button to press and there' s the administrator of the sky. Always, always there has to be a Urse administrator this one approaches, approaches this crowd,
these people who are there and asks good and what happens. They' re looking and they don' t push it that little button, because this is forever over and they ask and someone has ever pushed it and the administrator of heaven tells them they all ended up doing it to be part of the
good ones is. Nothing is eternal, neither heaven nor hell. There' s a movie that I really like that' s called The Fending Your Life, which they put in Spanish biza el paraíso, which is like a chipitche song, because it' s from a guy or a comedian named Albert Brooks who' s great and he' s a guy who dies and he' s going to hit the sky and what happens in heaven is a trial movie with a prosecutor and lawyer and what really makes one stay in heaven is that
he shows that he' s no longer afraid. And then it seems to me that if the opposite, heaven is fear in that movie or hell. Hell is probably that, but nothing is eternal in the world Richard is not, and that eternal punishment for evils that is hell is a disproportionate human invention, but also a human pretense in these times of madness, such as a
gross embrace. It' s clear we can all write. It is clear that we can all, with luck and vocation, devote ourselves to the craft of writing, but lately I think that we can not only write, but that we must write. Writing is the best therapy we have at hand. Welcome to a fictional audio course on how and why to write. Take the audiocourse of fictional writing in the locutorio com slash fictionario with Ricardo Silva Romero.
Always pick a good time. Always choose a good conversation. Third lap podcast. Subscribe now and listen to it every week on your favorite platform a podcast produced by the speaker. The newsroom follows us as the newsroom takes hold on social networks