#163

Oh wow, people don't believe in demons? People are fucking hilarious.

"Well, I don't believe in anything that isn't real! Fuck you, Joseph, you damn retrograde pill. I thought you liked science."

"Demons are just an excuse. That's a justification people made up for their own bad behavior or to explain away their weaknesses. Keep blaming your shit on demons, Joe, see where it gets ya."

Cool, so that's me cut down to size, and that will have learned me, and now I know better. 

*

People don't understand at all what is meant by the word demon, far less by what is meant by saying that something is demoniacal. Confusion about angels also abounds; listen. Demons are the comforting ones. They're just like us! Angels are terrifying, impenetrable aliens. Every angel carries a terrible swift sword. Mercy, justice, love--all wielding the hardest, sharpest objects in all creation.

But the point here is not qualification but existence and reality. So are demons real or not? 

Shit man, I dunno. But if you've never been fucked with by demons, it may be that they see no need for it.

So thoroughly do you already meet their needs.

Or maybe you were born with a kind of armor on, a cloak of invisibility, a heart so totally pure that it cannot be seen, let alone touched.

Perhaps what protects you is an indifference so complete, a self-narrowing so total, that you have actually become one, and everyone in your life is afflicted by you. Indifference is hella demonic, perhaps integral to the concept.

*

What I know about demons is that if you can see them and smell them, well, you might be crazy, or you might be beyond sanity, which is very different. I cannot. I do know that if I think of something, it is as real as anything else. Metaphors do not describe reality, they elucidate reality in relation to reality to reveal an unreal that is real. Angels and demons are metaphors, and metaphors are real. I know that everything is real in relation to the absolute because the absolute contains it, and thus the absolute contains all unreality in its suprareality.

Ghosts don't scare you because they aren't real and they don't scare you because they are real. You don't think of a tiger the way you think of a ghost. Tigers are real. They can really kill you, but you have to be near one and it has to actually happen. Not so with ghosts. What scares you is the unreality, the unrevealable, the not real which  has a real effect on you nonetheless. 

A ghost can kill you without being real, and it doesn't have to actually happen in order to happen.

*

Demons aren't real. They are just you, us, me. Sure. This is a fact. Nothing more than nightmares, which aren't real either. Just ideas, which aren't real, and never have any real effects on real reality. Just metaphors, which don't really exist, and don't affect real life. 

Glad to have that settled.

*

Look. I don't pretend to be anything other than an idiot. But if you don't think demons are real you are a concussed and tiny moron, which I'll just go ahead and say is very different from being an idiot. You can laugh at me, and people who are smarter than me can laugh along. You and Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse-Tyson can all touch dicks and crack some cold ones on some lawn chairs as you laugh at me struggling, my tiny brain shooting steam as it groans under the weight of such stone tablets, such ancient cruft, such superstitious nonsense, in this day and age.

Y'know, it'd be great if y'all were right. I remember believing there are no such things as demons, that the shadows on the cave wall are nothing more than shadows you can get away from. But out in the light? There's a lot more shadows than inside. 


--JL

clarifying postscript: Unreal affect has real effect. Unreal things are as affective and effective as real things because in fact there is no barrier at all between the unreal and the real. To be certain that something is unreal is murky at best. To be certain that the unreal thing does not exist is a hard misread. To be certain that only real things are real and only real things matter is nothing more than lucid, rational stupidity, a stupidity with its eyes closed, far more complete and embarrassing than ignorance. Certainty itself is a kind of petrification of thought.

Truly it is as though y'all motherfuckers really didn't read a page of Plato, really never looked at a word Socrates said. And far, far worse, by several orders of magnitude, forgot everything you ever knew as kids.