Satre’s Hell The iconic, classical depiction of hell is a deep, dark, and fiery crevice under the Earth. People are being burned and tortured. The devil is this red entity with the arrow-like ears and tail with the pointy trident. Another depiction of hell would be Dante’s Inferno, with his nine levels of hell with the deepest level frozen from the flap of Satan’s wings. All these depictions mean hell is this painful and frightening place, yet Sartre’s hell creates a version of hell that is much different. In fact, it is rather ordinary as it looks similar to any Victorian style room. Instead of a pit of lava, it has second-Empire French furnishings and instead of a spike rack submerged in fire, there are three seats. However, this facade covers a hell that is just as terrifying as the others mentioned. Jean-Paul Sartre explores his idea of hell within NoExit, and after much thought it contributed to a shift in my perspective. No Exit is about three damned souls, a coward, an adulterer, and a child killer, being stuck in a room in hell that resulted in mental agony for all three with the eventual proclamation of the iconic line attributed to Satre: “Hell is - other people.” This line is so constantly misinterpreted. People who read the line assume that it means that other people make one’s life miserable just as how the three damned souls made each other miserable, except Satre meant for the line to mean that everyone someone meets has a subjective view of that person within them. This version of one is forever trapped within that person’s mind and it’s near impossible to change. Truth is subjective not objective, which means the impossibility of finding satisfaction within ourselves if subjected to the views of others. Everyone is objectified in one’s mind as people put labels on their impression of someone. To live a life that constantly acts upon that view is hell. Garcin and Estelle, the coward and the child killer, both represent people living this hell. The doors, in the end, open for the trio, but Garcin declares that he cannot leave without the approval of Inez and Estelle. Estelle comforts him, which he then rejects because Estelle agrees only because she is attracted to him. Inez calls this out with “[s]he’d assure you you were God Almighty if she thought it would give you pleasure.” Garcin realized he cannot change the view others have of him as he begs Inez to say he’s not cowardly asserting, “it's you who matter; you who hate me,” and that “[i]f you'll have faith in me I'm saved.” Estelle is the form vanity needing constant attention and love or else she will torment within herself. Garcin realizes he cannot like her without lying to himself and create a false image of her, thereby responding to Estelle’s advances with, “I shan't love you; I know you too well.” No matter how much Garcin lies to himself, his view of her will not change because he knows what she has done and who she is. This cycle of not receiving the acceptance one wants is Satre’s hell. When I first read No Exit, I did not grasp the magnitude of Satre’s hell, as I simply thought that Satre meant that other people’s vicious ideas of us are hell. It is this constant effort of us humans to change other people’s versions of us. The truth is subjective and everyone has a different truth of us. Many people live through hell every day trying to make people understand them just like the characters within the play. I have learned that life is too short to live in hell daily. Other people’s opinions of you should not matter, as it is impossible for you to change what they think of you. It is only possible for them to change it themselves; therefore to seek constant approval of others is exhausting and toxic. The view of others does matter; it affects every aspect of your life. It dictates your friends and the environment you're most often in; however, it is necessary to focus on yourself as focusing on what other people think will end up in vain.
The Bitter Grind Four months of straight hell-week training for a couple dozen six-minute matches? That’s a standard wrestling season, and it would seemingly be the worst tradeoff in the history of trade-offs. Yet, those six minutes are worth even more than a lifetime of training. On the mat, there is always somebody who is better, stronger and faster,which means more the reason to embrace the grind. It took me two years to learn to appreciate the process, which is the direct correlation between the work you put in and results on the mat. I would be lying if I said that I loved every minute of the sport. In fact, I dreaded wrestling -- be it practice or competition. It was always a major weight on my shoulders. Prior to the season, weekends would be with friends in long car-rides to the east end, or taking pictures in Queens or the city. The onset of the season marked the sacrifice of these times for a bitter grind. It was all blood, sweat and tears either doing sprints and non-stop drilling the ever-so-cramped room with the heat cranked up or getting your face dragged across the mat in an attempt to stop an arm-bar, yet there was something attractive within this process of near-torment. Life is spent constantly improving and refining oneself, and with it naturally comes times of depreciation: when you either don’t improve at all or go back a step. In wrestling, this becomes vividly apparent as each tournament and match becomes testaments to improvement or non-improvement and that is the satisfaction in the grind. Yet, this isn’t enough to match the sacrifices made and the sheer pain of constant soreness every morning. In all honesty if I wrestled in another school under other coaches, I wouldn’t wrestle at all. It was my coaches, Pingitore and Dilevo, that ultimately made the sport so important. There is not another coach that cares to the extent of how much Pingitore cares about the sport and the team. It can be clearly visible in the veins that pop as he grasps his head in stress constantly during duel meets or a bad practice. To me as a freshman, Pingitore was just another word for agony. Some of his iconic lines that are embedded in my brain are but not limited to:
“We are done when I say we are done” “Shut up and drill” “Last sprint if you guys make it a good one(that was not the last sprint)” “You guys had more in you to do more sprints” “Your mind quits before the body does” “When your mind quits your body has 40% more” “This drilling looks terrible, I’m about to tell you guys to go home” “A good excuse is still an excuse” “One more won’t hurt”
For two years, this was my idea of Pingitore: an entity that repeats the same phrases that torments over and over again with corny athletic motivational lines sprinkled in. It was in one practice when he was yelling in my face as I was doing plate presses during conditioning that I truly realize that there really isn’t a coach like him. As god gave me that epiphany, I began to notice how much Pingitore really cares. It is times where he's biting his nails watching a decisive match in a close dual meet where I see his true character. The euphoria of winning within the wrestler is exemplified in the elation of Pingitore of each win from each wrestler. There isn’t a Coach that would wake up at 5 am with 5 hours of sleep on a Saturday to coach a team with half its roster missing due to injury or excuses or both. The confidence he instills within each wrestler is unreal, attempting to be at each mat during each match. Often he is squirming back and forth to shout moves to do or cheer on the wrestler. The dedication and emotional connection to his team and his sport is nothing short of inspirational. Dilevo is essentially a younger Pingitore. If shown to the unsuspecting individual, they are exact carbon copies: bearded white guys with similar haircuts who only wear shorts no matter the weather. They both speed-walk everywhere they go say the same lines of dialogue. They even have the same wardrobe: they would come in matching some days. Dilevo embodies many of the aspects of Pingitore as with his dedication and emotional connection to the sport as well as sacrifice. Dilevo has a patience unlike any other, willing to put up with the freshmen no matter the day. I would see him play spikeball with the freshmen the long wait before dual meets and it takes a lot to put up with the freshmen. He cares immensely about each and every wrestler. When nobody else was there to mop the mats, Dilevo was always there in his free period. He did what none of the wrestlers wanted to do and never complained unlike when a wrestler mops the mats. His compassion balanced with Ping’s tough love and that’s what made both Coaches so impactful. I never thought I would have made it through four years of wrestling. Each and every season I had constant thoughts of quitting the sport and doing something much easier. I was always tired of waking up sore and in pain for the hard practices of the day before. The frequent seasonal floor-sweepers is my existential dread. It's unnatural to me to go against nature, attempting to push a small mat to create friction had no purpose in my mind. My coaches instilled the idea of not giving myself excuses and responsibility for my short-comings. They would always announce the necessity of “being accountable” for the team and oneself. Each sprint we did because of one person shorting a repetition in drilling was not for that one person but for us as a team. They instilled within the team the sense of team as how we are in it all together. From them, I have learned the definition of persistence. Persistence wears down resistance, the old adage goes. This was embedded in me by my coaches through wrestling, with each literal and figurative fall. No matter what, I was to give it my all to accomplish the task in front of me. My father wasn’t present frequently throughout my upbringing, and with this caused me to lack effort in anything I thought was difficult. Ultimately, my coaches taught me to find love within the process.
Drank Since the annals of early men, alcohol has been connoted with celebration, happiness and relinquishment. The Babylonians had their goddesses of wine and the Greeks had the chaotic Dionysus. Yet as time develops, the bottle develops into the epitome of systemic inner-city struggle and addiction. The bottle becomes a trap that encapsulates the weak in a spiral to poverty and endangerment. Life at the pit of addiction essentially transforms into a meaningless cycle of seeking the next period of relinquishment. Kendrick Lamar warns of the dangers of the bottle as his central theme in his acclaimed song “Swimming Pool” from his album Good Kid M.A.A.D City. This first verse creates the general premise for the song as Lamar mentions how his background reinforces a cycle of self-destruction in how he “done grew up round some people livin’ their life in bottles” and how his “Granddaddy had the golden flask.” These images support the nurture ideology of how one’s environment and upbringing is causation for their actions. Lamar supplements this idea with the notion of the reasons for alcoholism, asserting how “some people like the way it feels” and others “wanna kill their sorrows.” The most powerful predicament he states is how people give into peer pressure. He transitions his point of view by utilizing a segue as he directly sings the chorus of how he “was in a dark room, loud tunes, looking to make a vow soon.” He spends his chorus detailing how his peers push him to drink more and more. He begins to like the feeling as he drinks on the verge of death. His conscience begins to speak to him to tell him to stop, yet he does not. This cycle is representative of the conscience within ourselves that tells us to stop enacting self-destructive behavior. Kendrick Lamar details a life spent living in the present making excuses for a fallible future. He uses a paradox to state this ideal asserting “[a]ll I have in life is my new appetite for failure.” This lies paradoxical as failure takes away one’s energy as opposed to giving energy, yet it is so necessary for artists to fail. In the environment Kendrick Lamar exists in, people are put in a continuous cycle of failure and self-loath. Lamar acknowledges the need for failure, but expresses his concern for constant failure and warns of the possibility of falling into that trap. He deems the causation and evident relief to be found back in the bottle, creating a vicious cycle. Kendrick Lamar utilizes alliteration to amplify the endeavor of constantly pouring liquor and drinking and how it dominates as a lifestyle. The word drank is constantly alliterated here to bring emphasis on not only the multitude of liquor consumed, but also the sheer addictive nature of alcoholism. Another key word alliterated is the word shot as seen in “[o]ne chopper, one hundred shots, bang.” Shot acts as a double entendre as it indicates alcohol itself and the effect of a gunshot. It indicates that the damages of one shot of liquor are as substantial if not more than that of a gunshot itself. The M.A.A.D City of the Good Kid M.A.A.D City is Lamar’s hometown of Compton. “Swimming Pool '' explains one of the many unfortunate circumstances that both disenfranchise and incapacitate African-Americans. The words of Furious Styles from Boyz in the Hood best explains: “there is a liquor store on almost every corner in the black community” because “[t]hey want us to kill ourselves.” The liquor stores that are so prevalent within low-income neighborhoods act as the New Jim Crow because they prevent social mobility and ensure poverty among young African-Americans.