"On What Is True," part 14

The following comes from a credible witness. We have excluded details the witness was not entirely certain about. The man now covered head to toe and through and through with vile cancers, moving under their compulsion, journeyed through odd passages until finally arriving at the gates of paradise. The sight of them filled him with anguish as he was forced to recall vividly the two times God opened the gates and willed the man to enter, asking only that he destroy everything absolutely of himself first. Failing to do so both times and having to watch those gates crash closed haunted him nightmarishly now. From outside the perimeter where he stood he could hear squeals and grunts of utter delight made by the paradisians inside. But all he himself could feel was the sickness and unbearable discomfort that his cancerous composition made him suffer each moment without distraction. Just then a pack of hounds surrounded him. They too were cancerous creatures, hungering for a cancerous meal. Growling and drooling they closed in on him. He fell pathetically to the ground, covering his eyes so not to see the horror to come. With sharp snaps the dogs bit off chunks of his cancerous tissue, as he writhed in unbelievable agony and shock. Soon he was chewed down in most places to bare bone. But by some strange cause all this missing tissue regenerated, but not as cancers, not as normal flesh, but as extraordinarily dense clusters of raw exposed nerves, bundled together, making among one another painful mutual contact, sending signals of excruciating pain into his brain-stem. The hounds, now spying this new delicacy hesitated not the least to begin chowing on the man's new nerve-bundle flesh. With just one bite alone, a dog would compress and mangle and soon rip off millions of raw nerve endings, sending a short circuit charge into the man's brain, while inside his head he felt like a thousand lightning bolts from a tornado had struck down upon his cerebral tissues. What word can be found to describe this much pain? The man thought of Dante's inferno and how no circle of hell rendered pain anywhere as severe as this. Oh how he envied the damned in the lowest circles of hell. How fortunate to be one of them, to suffer pain that was at least comprehensible even if unbearable. But this was not the end. As the dogs kept voraciously consuming his ever regenerating raw nerve-bundle flesh, his head was pushed and pinned to the side, placing before him a glimpse into paradise. He saw such exquisite healthy bodies of the paradisians, running to one another and making unbelievably satisfying love, so indiscreetly and shamelessly, in all the ways one could desire. He could even see well enough to make out their love organs, which although taking the normal shape, seemed composed differently than human anatomy. The same nerve regenerative forces must have acted on the paradisians' love organs, because they had come to be densely riddled with raw nerves, as if being made mostly if not entirely of nerve endings. But when the organs made lustful contact, it gave them pleasure as extreme as the man's chewed nerve flesh gave him pain. Oh what unbelievable delight he saw them have as they copulated furiously. Such expressions on their faces the man never saw anything like. How divine and extraordinary their pleasure was. He saw it all! And heard it too! Such sweet, sweet music of love and ecstasy like nothing ever dreamed of on earth. That was to be his eternal ecstasy! God willed it! Twice no less, God willed him to have it! But he failed the Will of God and himself and his world. He failed. All this time the dogs never ceased chewing the man's nerves, while the paradisians gave incredible pleasure to each other. At that moment the man realized just how limited Dante's vision of hell was. None of the damned really suffered supremely, not even close, not at all. For none suffered their painful torment while being forced to observe the inconceivable pleasures of those in paradise while knowing unmistakably that this pleasure was meant for themselves to have instead of their excruciating torture. Now, who will dare to deny that this is certainly true? What? Not even you, O Žižek!?! Not even you!?!