The Devil in Detail, page 13
“I think you were right,” I said. “I know there’s an argument that the example set by Christ’s crucifixion eventually did a lot of good by providing a lot of people with consolations, but the Church hasn’t been an unalloyed blessing. I know that there have always have been lots of people in it like Lionel, whose hearts are in the right place and who really do help out their fellows, but you have to balance that against the crusades, the Inquisition, and the patent fact that the whole enterprise is a betrayal and travesty of his ideas, given that he was really an individualistic anarchist. So yes, I think you were right, that Jesus would have benefited himself, and that the world probably wouldn’t be a worse place if he had taken your advice.”
“But you wouldn’t generalize the advice, would you?” he queried. “You wouldn’t want to advise everyone to settle for the world as it is, and the compensations that it offers, because that would run directly contrary to the principle that you formulated so proudly while you were walking back from the supermarket?”
“Touché,” I admitted.
“And given that I can’t foretell the future, and thus had no inkling of the fact that Jesus was going to get himself crucified, let alone that his followers were going to form a Church that would, in your opinion, betray and travesty all his principles, what you ought to think, if you want to be self-consistent, is that, given the limited information I had, I shouldn’t have given him that advice at all.”
He had me there. Honesty compelled me to admit it.” I suppose so,” I said, grudgingly.
“What about Faust?” he added, relentlessly. “Given that I’ve explained the pact that I actually made with him, rather than the one credited by lurid legend, do you think it was a fair deal?”
I was warier by now, but even so I said: “It seems to me that he got what he wanted: enlightenment, and it certainly doesn’t seem to me that he paid too high a price for it. If it’s the same deal that you’re offering me, then I’ll certainly take it, and if Spengler’s right, the entire modern era already has taken it, tacitly, except for a few stick-in-the-muds.”
“Even though I believe that in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow?” he reminded me.
I didn’t have to ask him why, if that was what he thought, he had offered Faust enlightenment. He was, after all, evil incarnate.
Instead, I stuck up for him: “I still think it was a good deal,” I said. “Enlightenment—knowledge and wisdom, that is—is precious. It’s worth paying the price, even in a modicum of grief and sorrow. The poison is the dose, after all, and without knowing grief and sorrow, how would we be able to measure the value of the rare moments of satisfaction that we do succeed in acquiring—more often by means of enlightenment, in my view, than ignorance, whatever people might say about its blissful nature.”
He nodded, as if making a concession. “Thank you for that,” he said. “I appreciate the sympathy.”
I couldn’t see that it was helping much, even in the education of my own dark mind, let alone the vaster reaches of the collective unconscious, but it seemed impolite to say so.
“I can’t see the future, of course,” he said, “so I don’t know what’s likely to happen next week, but you’ll forgive me if I take your assertion of your skeptical immunity to any kind of suggestion with a pinch of salt, given that you’re perfectly willing to chat on friendly terms with the Devil. So let me ask you, hypothetically, what you’re going to say next Tuesday or Wednesday, if Alex Castle’s computerized method of hypnosis really does manage to put you in touch with Him?”
I hadn’t actually thought about it, and admitted as much. “Why?” I asked him. “Is there something you’d like me to the Cosmic Mind, if I do get in touch with it—Him, that is?”
“Well, obviously,” he said, “given that I’m His antithesis—but I know from experience that it’s not as easy to deny Him when you’re actually looking into the Countenance Divine as it is when you have your back turned. Not that I’m taking it for granted that the experiment’s going to work, of course—its been tried before and failed, but with computer power increasing exponentially, and measuring devices for tracking what’s going in inside the brain becoming more sophisticated all the time, the dark mind really is going to become increasingly accessible to the probing of consciousness, and it might be only a matter of time before its archetypes are laid bare. I don’t mind personally, of course…but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if there were…disappointments.”
“Disastrous disappointments?”
“Perhaps.”
“For whom?”
“Difficult to tell—but the potential is there.”
“For me?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you think I ought to think about it?”
“Don’t you?”
“Is this part of our pact?”
“Oh, no—that’s just between us, and I’m perfectly satisfied with my part of that bargain.”
“In spite of the mediocrity of my soul and the fact that you think the enlightenment I hoped to offer you is just pseudointellectual bullshit?”
“That’s not your fault. You can only bargain with what you have, and can only provide the enlightenment you can provide.”
“Perhaps you ought to be grateful for its mediocrity, then—less wisdom and less knowledge, less grief and less sorrow.”
“I don’t feel grief or sorrow. I’m the Devil. That’s why the bargain isn’t really fair. You’re the only one at risk.”
I looked at him hard, wondering whether I could believe him. I had, after all, exposed his unreliability. Could I really believe that he didn’t feel grief or sorrow, even if he was the Devil…especially if he was the Devil? He certainly seemed to regret Lucile, even though circumstance had left him no alternative but to break her heart. In a way, I suppose, I had cause to be grateful that circumstance had never forced me to break anyone’s heart, even though it was difficult to feel the gratitude in question, because it really would have been nice, in a prideful sort of way, to think that I might have the capacity to induce someone to love me.
But I realized that I was looking at the question the wrong way, that I had fallen victim to a logical error. The Devil was a creature of the dark mind, of the source of the urges of which the emotions are the conscious manifestations. Of course he couldn’t feel emotions himself; that would have been a contradiction in terms, and no matter how generous the physical universe might be in admitting paradoxes, there was no way of escaping the inevitability of that one. Emotions belong to the light mind, no matter how dark-edged they sometimes appear to be; the archetypes of the unconscious, even if we sometimes make the imaginative effort to personalize then, to give them images and names, and put flesh on them in order that they can visit us and converse with us and make pacts with us, are entities that cannot possibly feel grief or sorrow, love or hate, joy or misery. They are the source of all those things, but the things themselves are refractions and shadows, intrinsically and essentially estranged from their source.
The Devil could not feel grief or sorrow. So why, I wondered, was he asking me questions about how he should have handled the Lucile problem, or what advice he ought to have given Jesus, or whether he had really done Faust a favor, or what I might say if, by some freak of neurological circumstance, Axel Castle’s experiment really did put me in contact with the Cosmic Mind—which could not really be a “Him” even to the extent that the Devil, with a little help from me, could be?
Why was he asking me such questions, and trying to strike a bargain, that could not possibly be meaningful to him—to the Devil behind and within the disguise with which my imagination had obligingly clothed him?
He’d told me himself, of course, in his own truthful fashion—the fashion of telling the truth in such a way that it would be misunderstood, misinterpreted, or simply missed.
He was in search of enlightenment: an impossible enlightenment, which would be forever beyond his grasp, because he was essentially an aspect of, and eternally confined by, dark mind, but about which he could not help but gravitate.
I—which is to say, my light mentality, my feelings, my soul—was the Devil’s pornography, stimulating something within him that was not lust, because he could no more feel lust than he could experience love or sorrow, but which somehow substituted for it in the pattern of his being, within the metaphorical black hole that he was, beyond the event horizon of the light mind.
And I suddenly wondered why, given the dimensions of freedom that I had in conferring an image and solidity upon him, in making him matter in the sense of being the possibility of sensation, I had given him that red cravat.
No sooner had I formulated the question, inevitably, than I knew the answer.
Baudelaire, when he had made the sartorial decision that henceforth, “his only colors would be black,” had made the exception that he would wear a red cravat, because it would give the impression that he had been freshly guillotined, that he was walking around with his head cut off, impelled not by life but some strange afterlife: that he was, in effect, a kind of ghoul.
People thought, of course, that he was just making a macabre joke, typical of his perverse sense of humor, but he was a writer, and all his truest remarks were made in a spirit of diabolical bluff, so that no one could or would believe them. I had always suspected that the poor fellow really did feel as if he were walking around with his head cut off, at least metaphorically and symbolically, and as if he really were a kind of ghoul.
Baudelaire’s biographers, I knew, had always struggled to understand his fatal and baneful relationship with his mistress, Jeanne Duval, who treated him appallingly and continually left him, but whom he always let back in when she turned up on his doorstep. Most of them, being mere biographers, attempting to understand him from a clinical point of view, without a proper sense of esthetics, had tended to assume that it was a matter of some kind of indomitable passion, some kind of perverse but ineradicable love, but I felt—because I thought about it as a writer would, admittedly one with a very mediocre soul—that I understood him more fully than that, and more intimately.
I thought that the reason the Baudelaire had always let Jeanne Duval back into his life, even though he knew that she was a toxic presence, was because she was better than nothing, and because, without her, he would have had nothing, Partly, that was a matter of practicality; it was because she was a syphilitic whore that he could do her no harm, being infected with syphilis himself, whereas he would have been taking on a terrible burden of guilt had he deliberately taken up with any woman that was not, but that was only a superficial reason, as all pragmatic reasons are. The truth of his incapacity to escape loneliness lay deeper than that.
That realization—the realization about the metaphorical significance of the Devil’s red cravat, I mean, and my induced theorizing about Baudelaire—was oddly discomfiting, and I realized that I was beginning to feel seriously queasy.
I watched the Devil drain his glass for what was probably the third or fourth time—he was more than half way down the bottle, which no longer had the label advertising it as Australian Shiraz, and from which, when he refilled his glass, the liquid pouring out was no longer red—and I suddenly felt an overpowering need to urinate, and fled from the room.
Nowadays, of course, when I’m an old age pensioner and afflicted by the kind of slow prostate cancer of which very few men of my age die, but by which far more than fifty per cent are afflicted, that feeling is commonplace, but in 1997 I had not yet turned fifty, and had yet to experience the majority of the symptoms of old age. For that reason, the need seemed like a symptom of a more serious malaise, and the conviction suddenly hit me, as I pissed urgently and copiously, that I really was ill, and that my poor body, laboring away beneath the reach of consciousness, was striving with all its might to get rid of something, to expel it from my being before it could do me any more harm.
I remembered something then that my sixth-form biology teacher, Francis Minns, had once told the class, while talking about processes of biological fermentation. The story is surely false, but, perhaps for that reason, it had stuck in my mind.
Siberian peasants, he said, sometimes did not bother with the tedious business of external fermentation as a means of producing drinkable alcohol. They simply swallowed as much raw grain as they could stomach, and as much yeast, lay down on top of the stove and went to sleep, turning their own gut into a bioreactor from which the alcohol could be absorbed as soon as it was produced. Serious addicts of intoxication, he suggested, would add agaric mushrooms to the mix, in order that the alcohol would be laced with hallucinogenic muscarine, for a real blast. And to cap it all, he told us, when they finally got up off the stove in order to urinate, they would drink their own piss, because their piss would be an alcohol/muscarine cocktail that would send them straight back into psychic orbit instead of allowing them to come back down to the direly frozen earth.
Unsurprisingly, I didn’t feel the slightest temptation to drink my own piss, because I was beginning to feel a desperate, if perhaps a trifle belated, desire to come back down to earth. And I had already formed the conviction that, whether my piss had any alcohol in it or not—as I strongly suspected that it did, given that my metabolism was taking the hit from the Devil’s drinking, even though my own lips hadn’t touched a drop—the alcohol was not the more dangerous element of the cocktail.
What I had breathed in with the dust of Glofeydd Diafol, I was suddenly convinced, was not some organic refuse dating back to the Carboniferous Era. The soft coal dust had merely been the matrix on which a modern, contemporary fungus had grown while the books from the old pit library had been stewing in their boxes. What I had taken aboard was something alive, something multiplying and changing, which my immune system had taken three full days to overpower, and was only now beginning to devour and commit to my urine. In all probability, it would be out of my system completely in another couple of days or so, but in the meantime, my immune system was reacting in a perfectly conventional fashion, turning what had been a feeling of muted and mild malaise into a feverish crisis, sending my metabolism into overdrive.
It could have been worse. In fact, it could have been a lot worse. I’d seen the Devil, as individuals suffering from Saint Anthony’s Fire were often reported to do, but I hadn’t suffered any of the other awful symptoms of ergotism. Whatever the fungus was that I’d taken in, it wasn’t nearly as nasty as Claviceps purpurea. I didn’t have to fear convulsions, or gangrene. Even though I’d taken aboard a relatively massive dose, much greater than Martin’s and very much greater than Penny’s or Lionel’s, my symptoms were relatively mild, even more benign than the slow cancers described by that term in medical jargon, like the ones growing at various points in my skin and the one that would soon begin to magnify my prostate and play havoc with my lower plumbing.
But still, it was a disease. It wasn’t just a mild intoxication. The Devil was not my friend; no matter how much sympathy I might feel for him, in my perverse fashion, he was incapable of feeling any for me—and no matter how honest the pact he had made might be, the small print hidden in its darker regions cast severe doubts on its fairness.
On the other hand, fair or not, it was the only game in town, for the moment, and it was better than nothing. It was better than loneliness.
For that reason, when I went back to the front room, having readjusted my clothing and my attitude, and pulled myself together, I didn’t want to find the Devil gone. I was hoping that he was still there, even though I now had some slight reason to be apprehensive about what might now be in that bottle from which he hadn’t yet finished drinking, given that he had evidently worked some diabolical magic on it.
I sat down on the sofa again, and looked the Devil in the eye, meeting his unfathomable gaze, before looking at the bottle. I had bought it off the shelves in Asda, and had paid for it at the till without raising a flicker of surprise or interest. At that time, I was certain, it really had been a bottle of cheap Australian Shiraz, whose principal attraction had been the fact that it was on special offer.
Now, the bottle was black glass, of a kind that had never been seen on any supermarket shelf in England or anywhere else. The liquid in the Devil’s glass was pale green.
I didn’t have to ask him what it was; it was absinthe: not the sanitized produce bearing that name that you can nowadays buy easily, but the demonized version derived from the flowers and leaves of Artemisia absinthium—alias wormwood—flavored with green anise, fennel and a cocktail of supposedly medicinal herbs, which had been banned in France in 1915 as a danger to the war effort.
I sat down, and I smiled.
I smiled because I knew that absinthe’s evil reputation was a myth, that it did not actually have the hallucinogenic properties that popular legend had credited to it, that wormwood was essentially harmless in moderate doses, and that the only harmful effects that absinthe had had in its heyday were entirely due to the high percentage of alcohol therein, which were effectively nullified if it was drunk, as most people actually had drunk it, mixed with liberal quantities of water. In Paris, in fact, where its evil reputation had been forged, the water had probably been more dangerous than the absinthe itself, and putting too much water in the mix, thus preserving a fraction of its native infestations from the bactericidal effects of the alcohol, had probably caused the worst of its reputed side-effects.
“I really am going to have a hangover in the morning,” I told him. “You lied about that. I don’t know what else you lied about, but you definitely don’t tell the truth all the time.”
