The Devil Never Sleeps: and Other Essays Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Part One - I Have Been Warned to Stay Away from Eschatology: I Can’t Do It

  The Devil Never Sleeps

  GENERAL DESCRIPTION:

  The Revelation of St. John

  Modern Attitudes and Masques

  GOOD NEWS

  Approaches to the Soul

  Elvis 20/20: Concluding Remarks at the Third International Elvis Conference in Memphis, Tennessee, 1997

  ELVIS=LIVES=EVILS

  The Millennium Pies

  Human Remedies Against the Devil

  Another Autumn

  Allen Ginsberg

  Hello, Cosmos!

  THIS FROM MY JOURNAL IN 1997:

  Week of the Dead

  The Manners of the Unspeakable

  How Do You Say Goodbye to the 20th Century?

  ANOTHER QUESTION OF MANNERS

  A Russian Poet at the Seashore

  San Francisco’s Poet Laureate

  Poetic Terrorism

  Solution: Enivrez-Vous: The Bars of New Orleans

  Part Two - In Defense of Innocence

  Bad Childhoods

  Innocence Lost Under Capitalism!

  The Unabomber in School

  The Art of Escape

  The Pleasures of Art

  Not So Fruit: Three Paintings by Amy Weiskopf

  ONE: STILL LIFE WITH MOZZARELLA

  TWO: VANITAS WITH SKULL

  THREE: MERLITONS AND SATSUMI

  The Heracliteans: Early Devils

  Part Three - The Devil in Eastern Euope, One of His Ancestral Homes

  Romania: The Varkolak

  Return to Romania: Notes of a Prodigal Son

  THE FIRST THREE TIMES: 1989, 1990, 1996

  THE FOURTH TIME (DIMENSION): 1997

  A LITTLE DIGRESSION

  THE RESTAURANTS

  MONEY & GOODS

  LEONARD OPREA (NARDI)

  SIBIU, THE FOURTH TIME AROUND

  MY FRIENDS, THE FOURTH TIME AROUND

  PRESCRIPTIONS

  THE DREAM

  DOGS

  The Berlin Mall

  Prague (cont.)

  A Simple Heart

  How We Got to Kosovo

  Exiles, All

  Part Four - The Devil’s Art: Autobiography

  Adding Life, Erasing the Record

  1.

  2.

  Against Synchronicity

  Collecting

  The Strangeness of Languages

  Animals: The Thin Furry Line Between Us and the Devil

  Walking Bear

  Grandfatherhood

  Love in the Nineties

  The Blessed Waters of Sleep

  Professional Hazards

  Part Five - Amnesia of the Body Politic

  Tolerance, Intolerance, Europe & America

  The Anxious Middle Class

  ONE OF THE DEVIL’S FIELDS OF NOUVEAU TRIUMPH

  The Angels in the Closet

  The Devil’s Most Insidious Aspect: Amnesia

  REMEMBERING ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

  The Hidden History of Chicago

  Shell Games

  Prosperity and the Devil

  Houses and Shops

  From American Life

  Fried Rice

  Marcel Duchamp Would’ve Loved Wal-Mart

  Mystery of the Market

  From Subversion to Whimsy

  Heat and the School for Crawling

  Ice

  Hint of Fall

  Air Travel and the Advance of Demonism

  Berkeley

  Ratio of Derriere versus Frontal

  Beauty & Safety

  Part Six - Virtuality Takes Command

  Virtuality Takes Command

  The V-Chip

  AOL Addict Tells All

  The Mouse with Glowing Ears

  Tech-Withdrawal Anxiety

  BOOKS BY ANDREI CODRESCU

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  Part One

  I Have Been Warned to Stay Away from Eschatology: I Can’t Do It1

  The Devil Never Sleeps

  The Devil never sleeps because he’s got too much to do and the things he’s already done keep him awake. So the Devil is no different from your average American with too much to do and too much to think about. If there is a difference between the Devil and the average Joe, it is only that the Devil feels no guilt. On the contrary, what keeps him awake at night is the pleasure of remembering, living his deeds all over again. The Devil uses insomnia to live twice, while the average Joe just breaks into a cold sweat.

  People once believed seriously in the Devil, so when bad things happened they knew who was responsible for them. Many bad things happened back then, so many that a whole class of church people existed whose only job was to keep track of all the bad things and their degree of badness. Not all things were equally bad. Some bad things that happened to one personally, such as disease and death, were the work of God because they were part of the pattern of common life. Bigger bad things, such as famines, plague, or earthquakes, could have been God’s or the Devil’s, depending on how wicked or God-fearing people were. If people were God-fearing and bad things happened to them, then it was Devil’s work. And twice vice versa. If the bad things that happened to the community were the Devil’s work, then the Devil’s agents who had caused these things (the Devil used human “minions” to do his dirty work) had to be found and burned alive. Burning alive the Devil’s agents was God’s work and it made people happy. The Devil rather enjoyed seeing his minions burn, so nobody was the worse for it, except the people burning. It was a win-win situation for the living.

  The Devil started losing friends and influence in the eighteenth century, when people discovered that many bad things had no single author. French philosophers, in particular, took some spirited whacks at both God and the Devil, though most of them—Voltaire, for instance—found the Devil a much more personable figure than his counterpart. The Devil shed much of his dreadfulness for the upper classes, mutating into a sympathetic, carnivalesque character, whose job was to suggest titillating possibilities. Sex and food, or lust and gluttony, lost their sinful terror and became delightful pursuits. Casanova’s memoir, The Story of My Life, chronicles, with methodical thoroughness and utter lack of regret, his lifelong indulgences. Casanova wrote his memoir in old age, thus reliving his devilish life during long insomniac nights. The Devil’s best champion was the Marquis de Sade, who methodically reversed the teachings of the Church to produce pornographic parables curiously devoid of prurience. In De Sade’s methodical work of virtue-demolition, the Devil is revealed as a logician and a grammarian. De Sade’s works, written mostly in prison, capture the antagonists in balance.

  After the eighteenth century, the Devil got more and more ragged around the edges, like a plush toy kicked around too long by rough children. By the end of the nineteenth century he barely had a place to live: most of the world had been discovered, even the scariest forests, and men’s souls were being taken apart by psychology. From carnival to operetta to a banal figure of speech, the Devil seemed to be nearly extinct. And then, surprise! Hitler! The sleeping bourgeoisie, safely ensconced in its ideas of reason and progress, gave birth to the Devil. Hitler embodied every repressed aspect of the Devil since the early Middle Ages. All that had been laughed away came back concentrated inside a little man with a tiny mustache who magnetized all the unfocused evil in the world and made the business of hell both serious and modern. Hitler was the classic Devil of the early Church, ignorant, bloody, banal, bureaucratic. He was part gargoyle, part Luther.

  In the Chris
tian world, until the Reformation, the Devil was as serious as the political climate. The Church portrayed him as adaptable. He was insidious and ready to take on as much credibility as was required by the Pope. This combination of adaptability and insatiability pointed to two crucial models for the Devil: women and Jews. In his development, the Devil took on women because they were accessible through lust (“weaker vessels”) and Jews, because they could spread far and wide the Devil’s dispatches. In the Middle Ages, the Devil looked physically like a Jew, a pictorial and psychological resemblance that was invented by Lutherans and carried forward all the way into Hitler’s gas ovens. This fate might have befallen women as well if they hadn’t been needed to propagate the race. As it was, only a number of women (“witches” and “temptresses”) were chosen to pay for their connection with the Devil, standing in symbolically for all womankind. The Christian Devil never ceased acting in the subconscious of Western people, even though he was greatly neutralized after the end of the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, when people were actually reasonable for a few minutes, he began receding again.

  When the Inquisition, which was the preeminent detector of witches and falsely converted Jews, lost its efficacy in Europe, it attempted to set roots in the New World. It failed resolutely. The Spanish Crown sent an inquisitor to New Orleans, but the locals shipped him back on the same conveyance he arrived in. He returned years later, not an inquisitor any longer, and distinguished himself by good works among Native Americans. Still, the Devil did get a berth on the Mayflower and came here with the Puritans. After the bloodletting at Salem, the Puritan ethos went underground, whence it emerges at regular intervals in American political and cultural life. Two recent examples: Kenneth Starr’s sexual witch hunt, and the prohibition against smoking in public places. The Devil is distinguished by his seductiveness and by the smoke that issues perpetually from his nostrils. Crusaders for so-called morality always take a stand against the Devil, though they often end up working in his interests.

  In the closing days of the second Christian millennium, many people in the great democracy of America have started believing in the Devil again. Born-again Christians in this technologically advanced country have begun an unholy obsession with old Satan while, ironically, in less advanced parts of the world, superstitious Islamic fundamentalists believe that America is herself the Devil. No question about it, the Devil is back. He hatches and blooms in the bafflement wrought in the faithful by excessive technology.

  For all that, the American Devil, a latecomer to these shores, evinces neither the highs nor the lows of the Satanic majesty honed over time in the cauldrons and on the gibbets of Europe. In this country, he neither raged insanely nor decayed properly, which is why he is still taken seriously. The aspect of the Enlightenment that struggled to diminish him had already won in Europe, leaving America free to take only the Enlightenment’s most high-minded and reasonable principles to heart.

  The Rolling Stones met with disaster in the U.S. in 1969, at Altamont, when they performed “Sympathy for the Devil.” This had never happened in England. Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger’s girlfriend at the time, explained that for the English the devil is a literary and comic figure, but that Americans take the devil seriously, which explains why the concert at Altamont appeared to many people to be the end of the peace-loving sixties, letting loose a decade of evil.2

  I am both European and American, so the Devil is for me both comic and serious. While the Devil remains, for Christian fundamentalists, a unique generator of evil, he has by no means stayed still. He has evolved, technologically if not psychologically, to keep up with the times. The same cannot be said, alas, about God, who is behind the times. God’s repertoire has been limited basically to the Ten Commandments and to permission (I hope!) for the use of his Son by televangelicals in pitches for money, and by politicals in pitches for power. God’s granting of licenses on his Son is seemingly limitless, which somewhat dilutes the message.

  The Devil has moved way ahead in both direct appearances and the streamlining of his vast operation. The Internet has been the Devil’s greatest invention since television. There was a time, in the heyday of the Church in the fourteenth century, when God and the Devil were poised in a balance of powers resembling the MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) policy of the Cold War. In those days, just like God, whose universe he mirrored, the Devil had scores of angels to produce the multitude of evils in the world. Like any bureaucracy, the Devil’s production office had branches in charge of major activities, and these offices were efficient or inefficient depending on the angels who ran them. Evil angels, just like the good angels, had personalities: They were modest or profligate, expansive or uptight, cold or hot, sweet or sour, bitter or tart, sported a full suit of feathers, were nearly bald, etc, etc. In other words, they were as close to humans as they could be. Everything was closer in those days: the sky, the stars, God, heaven, and hell. All you had to do back then was to stretch out your hand to brush it against something winged, furry, and uncanny.

  Things are not so cozy for God anymore, but we are really tight with the Devil. Thanks to the movies, television, and the Internet, we can now view devils who look more familiar to us than the strange people sharing our couch. Thanks to the film director John Waters, we now know that the Devil can be a “serial mom,” which is to say an ordinary, family-loving human being who lets out a bit of murderous steam when her chores are done. John Waters has illustrated remarkably the quality of evil in our time. As Hannah Arendt said, speaking of Nazis, evil is banal. “The banality of evil” is why many of us have no idea that it exists. The machinelike efficiency of Nazi Germany was just a modern bureaucracy.

  There is a difference between the grim Devil of fundamentalist Christians and the ubiquitous Devil of our secular culture, as seen on television and movies. Of course, fundamentalists aren’t fooled for a second: they can see his glowing paws in the dark, whether he wears gloves or silk stockings. The modern Devil operates both nakedly and in disguise. Nakedly, he speaks through secular humanists, one-world orderers (agents of ZOG—Zionist Occupation Government), Democrats, urban dwellers, clubbers of Rome, freemasons, Catholics, the Queen of England, rock ‘n’ roll, labcoated scientists (both above and under the earth’s crust), number crunchers, education boards, fetus killers, sexual deviants, media mavens, idolaters, image makers, evolutionists, and ironists. In disguise, he tries not to look or sound like any of the above to the extent that he sometimes sounds like a man of God. The Devil, as seen on television, at the movies, and on the Internet, is a multi-tentacled organism continually propagating its evil essences unto an innocent and corruptible body politic. Good Christians are not fooled by the multitude of the secular Devil’s guises, whether he pops up in the news or masquerades as entertainment. But the poor secular Devil barely know that he’s the Devil. He’s just … secular. He depends on the Christian Coalition and its kin to recognize and identify him. His self-image depends on it.

  A good student of the Devil knows that his job is to perpetuate this wicked world, which is why fornication is his favorite vice, and libido his medium. God, on the other hand, works to destroy the world in order to cleanse and purify it. This battle will be decided at Armageddon, at the coming of the millennium. On the subject of the millennium, there is disagreement, both about the date and about the sequence, but there is no mistaking the principal actors. The paranoids and the optimists, both secular and religious, are united in the belief of their righteousness. What follows is a classification of the righteous.

  GENERAL DESCRIPTION:

  The PARANOIDS are of three kinds: religious, secular, and technological. The religious paranoids are of three kinds, too: fundamentalist, New Ager, and paramilitary. The secular paranoids also have three branches: X-Filers, tabloidoids, and weekend satanists. The techno paranoids are divided also, like Gaul, into three parts: Y2K-ers, genetophobes, and ecodystopians.

  The OPTIMISTS are likewise classifiable acco
rding to strict Linnaean principles and occasionally overlap the paranoids. The three kinds are: liberals, secularists, and utopians. Liberals are of three kinds: free-marketeers, one-worlders, and armchair philosophers. Secularists, who are sometimes liberals, have three branches: laissez-fairians, post-Enlightenmentarians, and statophile utopians. Utopians, who overlap the religious paranoids, divide as well into fundamentalists, New Agers, and post-history buffetarians.

  Here is how their beliefs operate:

  KINGDOM: PARANOIDS

  GENUS: RELIGIOUS

  SPECIES: FUNDAMENTALIST, NEW AGER, PARAMILITARY

  Fundamentalists (God’s party) are sure their scriptures are about to bear apocalyptic fruit and can’t wait to see the rest of us burn in hell while they meet their Maker amid harp music and nard sprays.

  New Agers (the Devil’s party), informed by Nostradamus, astrology, oracles, private signs, misreadings of runes and glyphs, Kali Yuga, and various psychotics, can see the day of reckoning as surely as they can read their tea leaves.

  Paramilitary (the God-Devil Party) paranoids are impatient fascists with a death wish who want to take the rest of us with them in a willed Armageddon.

  KINGDOM: PARANOIDS

  GENUS: SECULAR

  SPECIES: X-FILERS, TABLOIDOIDS, WEEKEND SATANISTS

  X-Filers are sure that the government is keeping secret the presence of aliens (devils) among us, and that the alliance of government (which may have already been taken over by aliens!) and an interplanetary invasion force, means that the human race is at an end.

  Tabloidoids are broader-based X-Filers who add the Kennedy assassinations, the CIA, and any number of earth- or space-based conspiracies to bear on their feelings of total paranoid helplessness.