The Devil in Detail, page 11
There are people in the world who would have challenged his notion that esthetics ranked above all else, but I wasn’t one of them. I knew that at the end of the day, even mathematical equations, the laws of physics and the principles of ethics come down to a matter of esthetics. Truth is beauty and beauty truth, and although that certainly isn’t all that we need to know, it’s the foundation stone of the edifice.
“So, by way of summation,” I said, “you’re here in order that you and I can make a pact. You’ll enlighten me if I enlighten you. You’ve already answered a lot of my questions, I admit—so what is it you that want to ask me?”
“Well,” he said, “since you….”
That, unfortunately, was the point at which I threw up—after which my head began to spin, everything went dark and I probably lost consciousness. At least, I couldn’t remember anything more until the following day, and still can’t, the rest being lost in the darkness of the mind.
CHAPTER X
If ever the Devil tells you that it’s safe to drink with him because you won’t throw up and won’t get a hangover, don’t believe him.
I wish that weren’t true, because I really would have liked to believe his assurance that he never tells lies, but in my experience, at least, he is not a person to be trusted completely, and once trust has gone, once one simple lie, however trivial, has exposed the falsity of the universal generalization, then you can never be sure of anything that a person tell you is true.
Actually, you never can anyway. Even if you never catch someone out in a lie, you simply cannot believe anyone’s assertion that they always tell the truth. There is no such thing as perfect reliability, even on the part of Him—especially, in fact, on the part of Him. It is literally true that no one is or can be perfect. No matter how spotless their record to date might be, the possibility always exists that the next affirmation might be a downright lie.
The Devil might have tried to counter an accusation that he had lied about the vomiting and the hangover by reminding me that he’d only said that I wouldn’t suffer those things unless I wanted to unconsciously—but that’s an essentially dishonest strategy, and an unfalsifiable assertion, because it always leaves you the option of arguing that whatever happened is what you wanted to happen, unconsciously.
With all due respect to Eric Berne, I did not want that hangover. Depressed I certainly was, but certainly not determined to punish myself for my sins in such a futile and underhanded fashion.
So, to get back to the story, I woke up on Wednesday morning with one hell of a hangover, at least sufficient to suggest to me that even though there were two used glasses on the coffee table, I really had drunk the whole two bottles myself, and felt the entirety of their metabolic effects myself. Doubtless, if that had been the case—or even if it hadn’t, and the Devil really had taken his fair share of intoxication away with him—the effects of the dust of Glofeydd Diafol had added their component to the synergistic mix.
I had, of course, had a sleepless night the night before, and I was suffering from some kind of insidious poisoning as well as the effects of the alcohol, so it’s not particularly astonishing that I had slept unusually heavily and for an unusually long time, but I was still rather surprised to find, when I woke up—still fully dressed and lying on the sofa—that it was half past eleven.
By the time I’d scrubbed the vomit out of the carpet, as best I could, and drunk half a pint of water and two cups of black coffee, taken three paracetamol and had a bowl of Weetabix, it was way past noon and half the day was gone, utterly wasted without a shot being fired against the besieging forces of writer’s block.
I wasn’t feeling much like working anyway. I had a terrible hangover, and once the paracetamol took effect and the headache gradually began to ease, I needed to think. I had, after all, met the Devil, and had spent what must have been getting on for two or three hours in earnest discussion with him regarding the terms of a possible pact. That’s not the kind of thing that happens every day, and it is definitely the sort of thing that requires a certain amount of investigation after the fact.
Inevitably, such inquests begin with the question: “Am I going mad?” and continue with the supplementary interrogation: “Have I already gone mad?” but anyone with an atom of common sense doesn’t waste time lingering over such trivial queries. There were far more important things about which to wonder than mere issues of sanity.
For one thing, of course, I felt guilty, as one would after a close encounter with the Devil, especially one that had not involved a long spoon. I felt guilty because I feared that I might have short-changed him. One way or another, he really had given me a lot of information, which probably did qualify as enlightenment even if, in the light of the hangover issue, his dogged assertion of his own truthfulness had to be regarded as a trifle dubious. On the other hand, as soon as he had begun to formulate a question that might have permitted me to reciprocate, in my doubtless modest and light minded fashion, I had conked out.
I had failed to keep my part of the bargain.
I knew, of course, having read a lot of deal-with-the-devil stories, that most writers consider cheating in the context of diabolical pacts to be not merely permissible but de rigueur. I have never considered that to be ethical, however—or, more importantly, esthetic. If you make a pact with the Devil, it seems to me, you are honor bound to keep it. If you have promised him your soul, you ought to deliver. What kind of person does it make you if you welsh on the deal? Worse than him, at a minimum, if he has followed through with his part and supplied the things you demanded. If you have voluntarily offered yourself for damnation, in return for various concessions, then you should damned well be damned, or else—however paradoxically—you are simply proving that you are damnable.
I did not want to be found wanting in my own dealings with the Devil, but I could not be certain, that Wednesday afternoon, that I would have a chance to make good. After all, if the effects of the dust of Glofeydd Diafol were to wear off during the day, I might not see him again, and if Martin followed through with his threat to burn the books and mount a full-scale assault with the vacuum cleaner, I would very probably not have the opportunity to repeat the experiment.
It did occur to me that I would still have the option of going to Pwllmerys itself; even though the pit itself had presumably been sealed when the old National Coal Board of 1947-1987 had closed it down, there still had to be a lot of dust from its special brand of coal lying around in the vicinity. On the other hand, I had a suspicion that mere superficial dirt wouldn’t do the job, or heaps of slag. The dust I’d imbibed, as I’d already observed, had been incubating in the boxes in which the remnants of the library had been stored for a long time, and it wasn’t just dust, it was book-dust. The coal-dust had been mingled, not merely with tangible paper-dust and ink-dust, but the dark-matter dust of intellect and rhetoric, and even though the books in question had been tedious, at least from my point of view, they were nevertheless products of human intellectual and esthetic endeavor, which someone had taken the effort to write, under the spur of the urge to communicate and persuade, to impress and exhibit.
I couldn’t help wondering what the dust might have produced if only the books had been better books, if only the spirit of Émile de Girardin’s Romanticism hadn’t been squeezed out of them by a much duller and more pedantic notion of education. If the library really had consisted, as it surely should have done, of the works of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, William Blake and Thomas Love Peacock, Thomas Spence and Mary Wollstonecraft, what a Devil they might have produced in association with the fuel of Glofeydd Diafol!
Not that I was complaining about my Devil, of course, but not all Devils are equal. Some are more evil than others, some more tempting, and some—but not, I fear, mine, let alone that of the Welsh Chapel—blessed with genius.
At any rate, I had no guarantee, that Wednesday afternoon, that the Devil would return, so that I could make good on my promise, and, as I say, I felt guilty about that, as an honest man would.
I tried to console myself with the thought that if the Devil really wanted to come back, he would surely be able to do so, perhaps even without the assistance of the magic coal-dust, if, in fact I had pissed that away. After all, we were acquainted now, and he no longer had to observe the same polite protocol. I hadn’t actually told him, in so many words, to drop in any time, but I think it had probably been tacitly understood, even though the fact that I’d deliberately opened an inferior bottle of wine after we’d finished the first was a sin against the principles of hospitality.
It was while I was trying hard to assure myself that the Devil could drop in again if he wanted to, even if he only had the natural resources of my dark mind to draw upon henceforth, that another thought struck me, which disturbed me slightly, although there was no logical reason why it should.
What if the Devil didn’t need to come back? What if he didn’t need to talk to me again in order that I could fulfill my part of the bargain we’d tacitly struck? What if I’d already fulfilled my part of the bargain, unconsciously?
After all, I couldn’t be entirely certain that I had stopped talking when the last chapter cut off. I couldn’t remember having said another word, but that didn’t necessarily mean that I hadn’t, and even if I hadn’t said another word, that didn’t necessarily mean that my mind hadn’t continued working, in a fashion that Devil could read and comprehend. He was, after all, an inhabitant of the dark mind…and more precisely than that, of my dark mind.
Perhaps he could have obtained what he wanted without my even knowing it. It would have been sneaky, and perhaps a trifle unfair, but in spite of the revisionist reinterpretation he’d offered of himself, he did have a reputation….
I refused to believe it, of course. I decided that, in spite of the slip with regard to the vomiting and the hangover, I would continue to trust him, at least for a little while longer. I decided that he would come back, if he could, and that he would give me the chance to answer his questions in the light of mind, consciously, conscientiously and judiciously, as befitted a decent human being and a half-way decent science fiction writer.
In the meantime, though, I decided that in order to do that, I needed to give a little more thought to the answers that I was going to give, in order that they would, in fact, be as conscientious and judicious as I could contrive.
I was slightly handicapped by the fact that I didn’t know exactly what questions he might ask, but that was only a quibble. All I had to do was ask myself what the Devil would, in fact need to know in order to continue and facilitate the metamorphosis of the collective unconscious, at least within my own dark mind and perhaps more generally.
That seemed simple enough, and I had the Devil’s own word for it that simplicity is sometimes a useful intellectual strategy.
So what did the collective unconscious need to know, if its hypothetical archetypes were to work progressively on the task of their own self-improvement?
It was a good question—or so it seemed at the time.
I took three more paracetamol, drank half a liter or orange juice and made myself two fried eggs on two slices of fried wholemeal bread before trying to get to grips with it, and I also ate a Mars bar in order to boost my sugar supply. I felt better after that, although I knew I wouldn’t be winning any awards for healthy eating and a balanced diet.
Then I started thinking, very seriously, albeit simplistically—for tactical reasons—about the nature of the unconscious, the dark mind that supplies the greater component of human mentality.
I began, logically enough, at the beginning, with Schopenhauer, or what I could remember of his argument without actually looking it up—you will remember that it was 1997 and that Wikipedia did not yet exist, so “looking up” still involved a certain amount of heavy physical labor.
Put bluntly, I reminded myself, Schopenhauer’s argument was that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a bad bet, which no rational student of probability would take on. Even the most cursory study of the operation of the world suffices to demonstrate that the sum of pleasure therein is far less than the sum of pain, and that the raw probability of getting through life with a tolerable minimum of pain and a satisfactory dose of pleasure is a lot less than evens. In terms of the calculus of probability, the game is not worth the candle. That’s where the dark mind comes in: by supplying us with an unconscious “will to survive” that drives us on against the odds, taking the conscious form of such blatantly deceptive but perhaps psychologically necessary illusions as hope, faith and optimism. In spite of the odds, and even in spite of knowing the odds, we keep on thinking that things might work out anyway.
The unconscious will to survive isn’t limited in its behavioral expressions and conscious refractions to mere matters of self-preservation, of course, but has corollaries in terms of urges to ambition and competition—which is to say, to the enhancement of one’s own survival chances at the expense of others—and also urges to indulge in behaviors favorable to successful reproduction, including sex and parental care. All its conscious manifestations are, of course, subject to various degrees of corruption and perversion as well as varying degrees of intensity, which are collectively responsible for the majority of individual character traits.
There are also, according to Schopenhauer and others, various ways in which the conscious mind can attempt to compensate for the natural stacking of the odds against the likelihood of avoiding pain and maximizing pleasure, a few of which actually work, to some degree, although many simply engage in an ultimately hopeless struggle to beat the odds by means of ingenuity, self-deception and enhanced perversity.
Naturally, psychologists have attempted all manner of sophistications of that basic template, by means of descriptive observation and prescriptive recommendation, attempting much more elaborate analyses of the hypothetical contents and mechanisms of the dark mind, and more elaborate prescriptions for the assistance of consciousness in its attempts to supplement or substitute for the blind and crude urges supplied by the unconscious. Most such frills, however, are fantasies of one kind or another, whose successes depend almost entirely on the placebo effect.
Attempts to investigate the workings of the dark mind via electrical analysis of brain activity rather than by introspection—or, as in Axel Castle’s experiment, in which I’d volunteered to help out the following week, by a combination of the two—have complicated understanding further in some interesting ways, but haven’t yet added very much to traditional forms of “mindbending” or “brainwashing” techniques intended to give outsiders a measure of control over the dark and light minds of others.
Where did the Devil fit into all that? Well, I supposed, in terms of Jungian jargon, he was an archetype of the collective unconscious: a particular parcel of urges, the psychological and behavioral effects of which consciousness has little option but to characterize, and has a strong temptation to personalize. He was an idea, formed in antithesis to and close association with the idea of a divine Creator responsible for existence and organization, routinely characterized and often personalized, as the Cosmic Mind, if not simply as God.
The Devil I had actually talked to was not the archetype itself, of course, but merely a conscious image thereof, a reflection adapted to consciousness—both generally and idiosyncratically—by the imagination. Other people fortunate enough to meet him would doubtless have seen him differently and would have had a very different conversation, even though he would have been fundamentally the same and the one and only Devil, and many of those other seers would not have had the delusion, no matter how much of the dust of Glofeydd Diafol or some biochemical equivalent they had absorbed, that he had offered them the kind of pact that he had offered me.
Many people, in fact, believe that the collective component of the dark mind is essentially unchangeable, and that it is only the personal and idiosyncratic modifications made to it by various kinds of mindbending, operating via consciousness, that remain amenable to modification or repair, by means of the same processes. Such people believe that even dealing with personal neuroses is difficult, although not hopeless, but that attempting to deal with the neuroses of the entire race—the innate and hereditary components of the collective unconscious—is beyond the scope of individual action, even within the arena of the individual brain and mind, let alone on any larger scale.
Clearly, I didn’t believe that, or I would never have conceived of the Devil as I had conceived him. At the very least, I had to believe in the theoretical possibility that making a formal pact with the Devil, provided that we each lived up fully to our end of it, might enable me to bring about some modification in the archetypal architecture of my own unconscious—and perhaps, given the right environmental circumstances, enable me to persuade at least a few other people that similar modifications were possible and desirable.
Evidently, I had to believe in the latter possibility too, because I was a writer, and what can the raison d’être of a writer possibly be except to communicate his ideas to other people and influence, more or less ingeniously, the way they think? Even the most unsuccessful writer in the world—and I was not so very far off that status in 1997, although I am considerably closer to it now—has to nurse that ambition, even if bitter experience shows him how heavily the odds are stacked against him, and even if his stocks of faith, hope and optimism stand so close to zero as to be equivalent to frank despair. Even if all he that has going for him is simple pig-headed Yorkshire obstinacy, he cannot and does not give up, especially when, at least once in his life, he has encountered the Devil and sworn to uphold the pact that he has made with him.
So, on that Wednesday, albeit somewhat numb and enfeebled in my intellectual acuity because of the after-effects of the dust of Glofeydd Diafol, the hangover and the paracetamol, I knew that my time had come to attempt to be a hero, even if I only were only to end up an absurd Don Quixote, and that I had to figure out what I was going to tell the Devil, if and when I saw him again, and if and when he took up the questioning where my sudden attack of nausea had presumably forced him to break off.
