Autor:    Julián Silva Puentes

LOST PARADISE

In 1667, John Milton reinvented the legend of the fallen angel with two lines that were made from the world´s imagination: “Heavenly muse sings, man´s first disobedience!” Before Milton, the story of Satan and his expulsion from paradise was well known by saints and scholars. Starting with John M., the myth of hell, Satan, the primal couple and the tree of wisdom, came to the common people. Even those who did not know how to read or write knew about the work of the English writer, who was considered a rebel from the days before the beheading of Charles I of England in 1649.

Charles I of England was a king whom the will of the people led to the scaffold at a time when being king meant being so by divine command. Removing the head of a king was like disgracing the Creator. John Milton did not participate directly in the trial of Charles I, but he wrote pamphlets against the king that could well have pushed him to his fatal fate.

Of all forms of murder, regicide is the most tolerated. Assassinating a king means freeing the people from a tyrant. It is the most plausible excuse. King Louis XVI of France was perceived as a indolent leader. Known is the phrase of his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, when she was informed that the people were dying of hunger. “Feed them cake,” she is said to have responded. A few years later she was put to the guillotine. Her husband too, as well as 16,594 other people.

CURIOUS FACT: The inventor of the guillotine was not the doctor Joseph Ignace Guillotin, as is often believed, but he was the one who proposed its use in the Constituent Assembly during the French Revolution. Legend has it that while the reign of terror lasted, poor Joseph was put to heet. It isn´t true. What is certain is that another doctor with the last name Guillotin, J.M.V. Guilltín, a doctor from Lyon, was executed by this means.

THE PARADISE

Milton believed that Eden was located in Telassar, a city in Babylon near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Today, what was formerly known as Babylon is Iraq. In Iraq it is presumed that human civilization as we know it began. From there Hammurabi came out with the principle of retributive justice “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Alexander the Great invaded it in October 331 BC and a few hundred years later the Mongols arrived. In the 14th century the Ottomans appeared. The British arrived in 1919, wiping out what remained of the Ottomans, and in 1978 Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq. Between 1986 and 1989 almost 180,000 civilians were exterminated in the war between Iran and Iraq. The Persian Gulf War began in 1991 and in 2003 the United States invaded Iraq. Such is the paradise from which we were expelled.

REBELLION

John Milton said: “The spirit lives in itself, and in itself can make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven”. The world is not what it was in 1667, although it is still exactly the same as when Milton wrote his "Paradise Lost". King Charles I of England was beheaded by his own people and something like that never happened again. In 1793 again happened it on to King Louis XVI of France, but that was only because the French Revolution was in vogue. Now, having a king´s head taken off has not happened since then, because Abraham Lincoln was only president and he was shot. Tsar Nicholas of Russia was shot along with his family, but he was not king but Tsar, which means Caesar.

Some made the world a hell because it was hell that they had inside. After rebelling against the most basic sense of empathy and human decency, they had to search within themselves to find an excuse to justify their actions. Some called it God, others, racial purity; there was a king so fond of time in the way of repairing watches that he was too late to escape with his wife and his four-year-old son, and they lost everything except the memory of the horrible things that would happen to them.

Abraham Lincoln´s rebellion can be classified as just, because he confronted the southern states to abolish slavery. 650,000 deaths cost him his vision of the world, where men are all equal. Whether it is fair to those who died is something we must ask of them themselves.

What would they themselves say about their own death when they did not choose to die the way they did? I don´t believe anyone chooses to die unless they do so because they want to die. The desire to die contradicts the survival instinct. The first homosapiens must have had a great survival instinct to look at his surroundings and believe that they would come out safely. Attacking a mammoth holding stone-tipped spears denotes a sense of rebellion that borders on fanaticism. Fanaticism towards who or what, is something we do not know. Organized religions postdate the Paleolithic, and all we have left of the first thinking men are a few fossils and rock art found in caves around the world.

CURIOUS FACT: I have a friend who liked to stain the walls of the houses where he got drunk with his poop. He used to leave perfect handprints and on one occasion the profile of his face. According to what he said, he didn´t remember anything because he was drunk. It was true. Partly. On the other hand, I believe that he went crazy when he drank and he did remember everything, but he was ashamed to admit it. Maybe he couldn´t avoid it. Maybe he wanted to leave his mark on the world like the cave people did so that we could remember him forever.

PARADISE LOST

Every morning when I get out of bed I count down the things I need to do. Work tops the list for obvious reasons. This is followed by daydreaming about everything I still have to achieve in the world.

Dreaming has become an essential part of life for me. Just as I have to make daily reports to justify my salary, I spend an hour every day on the way to work imagining a quiet place to get by without having the life beaten out of me. Dreaming, then, is as important as everything I do to survive.

"Survive". What an ugly word! Lying to get what you want is surviving. Spending your life adding successes to justify the cross that you decide to carry is surviving. To stop exploring the vast world we were given, because you can´t always put a price on your personal experiences, is surviving.

Dreaming for John Milton must have been as necessary as breathing. In a world where light does not reach, one must shine with the fire of the spirit to evade the trap of failure. Having failed in all aspects of life after having everything is more difficult than being a loser whose constant in life has been losing.

When John Milton wrote Paradise Lost his wife had died, he was blind, poor, and living in the home of one of his sons. He spent some time imprisoned when Charles II of England restored the monarchy and many of Cromwell´s followers were beheaded with the same ax that decapitated Charles I. It was once feared that this would be Milton´s fate, but his glory as an agitator had passed into relative oblivion after working so many years as Cromwell´s “Secretary of Foreign Languages”. He was no longer a recognized writer, but some remembered him. He was no longer a rebel either because his strength and health had abandoned him. He was the shadow of a man who one day saw himself shining eternally like the sun. He was in the twilight of his life and was doing nothing more than surviving with a suitcase full of memories, bright shadows and broken promises.

CURIOUS FACT: When I was a child in San Gil, there was an old woman we called Satan because she wore shabby clothes, carried a sack on her back, and insulted everyone who passed by her. She was always seen on the sides of the bridge dodging trucks and receiving insults from children. “Satan!”, We shouted as we passed by her. “Satan!”, the adults shouted at her, because the old woman insulted the children with horrors never before heard. “Satan!”, we all shouted one Saturday morning when we saw the old woman who had just been hit by a car, lying on the side of the bridge with her bloody dress and her eyes looking at who knows what impossible thing up in the sky.

…

San Gil´s story of Satan is not the same as Milton´s. Milton´s Satan did not wear rags or carry a sack full of garbage. Milton´s Satan retained some of the majesty he had when he was the closest angel to God. Even in hell where “the shadows shine,” Satan remembered the blessedness of God´s love. However, on his way out of hell to pervert Eve and Adam in Eden, what made him beautiful began to disappear as he approached the primal couple to hurt the Father´s pride as his creator.

Pride was what led Satan to rebel against God. This is what those of us who were raised in the Catholic faith learned in catechism. Those of us who were raised in the Catholic faith had to do something called “catechism” before receiving first communion. Thirty-four years have passed since then, but I still remember the priest who gave us the course on that subject.

His name was Father Saturnio and he spoke to us about hell as if he himself had been there. I don´t mean that he was a good man, or he was a terrible sinner. I don´t know one thing or another. I´m talking about the realism with which he described the rivers of lava, the crows that peck the eyes of the tortured and the snake of original sin entering through the mouth to come out through the ass and return to the place where she entered in the beginning. The myth of the “Ouroboros” (the snake that bites its own tail) came to life in the bodies of sinners, according to the father´s description. He drew circles in the air and showed his yellow teeth by opening his mouth and hissing as if he were a snake himself. He wanted to make hell a real place for us. Nothing is more impressionable for a child than an old man dressed in black telling horror stories.

“Those are exaggerations of a very old and half-crazy man”, Mom said. My mother knew him from when she was a child and even in those days he was quite particular as a priest. But he was a man of God and those people were held in as high esteem as the president of the republic. “Deus voluntas est,” Father Saturnio said before finishing class, referring to the fact that the horrors he had just recounted were “God´s will.”

Father Saturnio is the only priest I have heard speak in Latin. In the days when he was young, mass was said in that language. My mother remembered him, as did my grandmother. “Father Saturnio is crazy,” my grandmother claimed even though she had known him all her life. My grandmother believed in a terrible God because that´s how she was raised. Despite this, she was not the praying type that you could see in people her age. She was more reserved in her religious matters, because prudence was one of her virtues.

The copy of "Paradise Lost" by John Milton that I read to write this essay, chronicle, reflection or excuse for not working, I took it from my grandmother´s library. It must have belonged to my grandfather. Editorial Iberia, 1953. The pages are yellow on the edge and the paste, covered in leather and red thread, falls apart every time I touch it. It smells like it has been stored and I love it. Everything that talks about another time drives me crazy, but not in the way that Father Saturnio was. I´m talking about a fixation on worlds that no longer exist, but that, thanks to books, even after centuries, we can read and even learn something from them.

John Milton wanted us to learn something from him, especially his struggle to be relevant at a time when his body was failing him. An idea can be shaped, destroyed and revived. The body, the decay of it, once begins, will end up on earth like everything that lives and dies in the world. An idea can survive the one who gave birth to it like the light that the spirit emits before its own demised. John Milton wanted to immortalize that light in the archetype of evil and the struggle to find a sliver of light in a world overshadowed by the darkness of death, where innocence is as dangerous as the good intentions of the wicked when they believe they are doing good.

And yet, despite all his efforts to immortalize his name, John Milton died. King Charles II of England died and so did Cromwell. All the people who have set foot in this world have followed the same fate, just as I will and you will too. There is nothing we can do to avoid it. We don´t even know if there is anything after all this "man´s work that he toils so much for under the sun", but it is that rebellion against the inevitability of our destiny where lays the courage of the hero who rises after losing it all. A hero who survives loss is one not because of his resilience, but because of his faith in a constant and wonderful NOW.

Staying alive in a world full of danger is the only act of rebellion worth undertaking. Correct: remaining optimistic in a world full of dangers is the only act of rebellion worth undertaking. It is also important to leave testimony of that struggle on a piece of paper, to tell the world that someone like you and me once existed and, despite everything, our lives mattered. Not all of us came to change the order of things, but if we can get someone to see this world with magnanimity thanks to our foolish stumble, we can consider ourselves well served.

This is how John Milton and every other human being must have understood it since the dawn of the Quaternary. This is how I understand it now when I feel that I am beginning to grasp some things whose usefulness I do not know. Maybe what I think I know is not useful to anyone and I am totally wasting my time. Now that I think about it, I hope it´s like this: a total waste of time. Of my time and that of whoever reads this. Maybe my vision of Paradise Lost is a shot in the air and no one cares. If not, if someone made it this far, I hope they stopped doing something productive to waste time with me. Closing your eyes and letting your imagination run wild to discover something about yourself is the best wasted time that can be spent. In a world in which even time is monetized, rebelling against that which is quantifiable is not a privilege but a duty. The duty to stay alive long enough to learn something valuable before leaving this lost paradise that was given to us for trusting too much.