TO HELL ON A HANDCART

Philosophers abound in this little tale of human folly...

The cold stone statue of Aristotle seemed to grin and it crankily raised its right arm from a place of rest where it had accrued a birds’ nest and half a dozen sleeping spiders over the past few centuries, and pointed towards the sunset.

“There’s hell,” it said.

So you can speak English in the modern idiom, I thought. That’s clever for an ancient Greek...

“And if you look over there ...” it shifted its pointing finger by a degree or two, “there’s your handcart...” it added, and smiled again before dragging birds’ nest and spiders back to where they’d been before it stirred, and sighing itself back to what may or may not have been repose.

Why would I want them? I wondered to myself. Am I really going to Hell and why would I need that handcart?

“If you were to climb onto the handcart I’d push you,” breezed Descartes from a bus shelter.

“Who are you?” I blurted out.

“You can call me Rene while I push you,” he murmured. “Look: I don’t have much time before the world ends, and I might as well do something useful, something more relevant to the moment than endless philosophising!”

“Rene, I think I love you...” I whispered, knowing that loving anything must be better than listening to another round of lies from the Prime Minister and her cabinet or the dreadful politicians and their endless dance around the world, even though it often amused me how lies told by different egotists can sound so different from each other until someone explains that they’re the same.

“Less of that!” snapped Descartes, and he climbed onto a passing bus and was whisked away, hurtling towards the ruby red of the sunset before it flickered out of being.

“There you go,” sighed Aristotle’s likeness. “You missed the bus. Now you’ll have to get on that handcart or you’ll never arrive in Hell in time for tea.”

“I don’t want to go to Hell,” I whispered.

“There you are: talking to statues again,” grinned Karl Marx who I recognised from a portrait in an encyclopedia I stumbled over the other day. “Take no notice of the fellow! I never do.”

“But you do need that handcart,” pointed out Aristotle’s effigy. “A man must needs have transport if he’s going to Hell or he’ll never get there...”

But I’m there already, a voice inside my head told me. I’m in as big a hell as a fellow can get and still be alive… we all are, the law-makers have seen to that

“It’s where we’re all going,” explained Aristotle. You must see that, surely? It started off with a lie...”

“A lie?” I asked, suddenly feeling alarmed.

“Indeed. There’s a rule that says that if enough people believe something then however ridiculous it is it must be the truth. So if enough people believe in God then that deity must exist even though his existence flies in the face of all logic.”

“That’s nonsense!” I said.

“You might say that, but then, you’re not Aristotle,” grinned the statue. “Just look at the world! It isn’t God any more, though it would be better if it were! But anyone who wants power knows all about the strength of lies! Tell enough lies until enough people believe them and pouf, those lies become truth and the whole world’s changed.”

“I’ve never heard such turgid crap in my life,” I grunted.

“Maybe it’s best if you die in ignorance,” mused Aristotle, “that way you won’t be kicking yourself for not doing anything about it before it’s too late, like it will be any moment now. Take Hitler, for instance, they could have done something about that little squirt way back before he became a big squirt and lots of things would have changed...”

“Like what?” I demanded.

Aristotle’s statue giggled.

“You know the answer to that one,” he whispered. “He knew the truth about lies, all right. There was one thing he didn’t know, though.”

“What was that?” I demanded.

Aristotle’s statue touched the side of its nose as the first nuclear bomb crashed into him and blew us both (and the bus shelter) to Kingdom Come.

Oh sod it, was my last thought as my atoms smashed into those of the handcart which was trundled slowly away, being pushed by a liar with a very orange face.

© Peter Rogerson 03.12.16