The Essence Remains

[Robert Crisman]

"And so here we are on this fine summer day," Douglas smiled, a bit wearily I thought, "and the question is now, how shall we, and by we I mean you, find our devil?"

He saw my surprise at his used of the "you" and said, "Dear, I'm 1,000 years old, though I must say--" here he laughed "--I don't look a day over 912, and while we live an ungodly long time, perhaps forever or close anyway, we Nosferatu do age, and aging in us takes us out of the world, so to speak, to a place where concern disappears. Our senses, far greater than man's to begin with, expand to embrace the Valhallas, the dance of atomics, galaxies past, present, future, and though our bodies remain, our minds pass through membranes that wall off the planes of existence, to the realm where all and nothing embrace and both time and space have passed beyond memory to ashes.

"All this is, of course, still a ways off for you young ones," he laughed, "though it has already started for me, and meanwhile, I really can't say that I envy you one little bit in the task you now face: the devil has taken on body alright, which is to say he has tangible limits and so can be killed--but he grows. He is fed by the fear and in turn feeds it and its children--the myriad addictions, the breakdown of thought, the growing embrace of old, shopworn myths and with that the posing of greed as the virtue of virtues--all to the point where fear now parades as the Paradise proffered by admen in secondhand dreams.

"All forms have dissolved in this what they call the post-modern world: bibdribble goes by the name of sweet reason, even as dribblers deny that the world can be known, and meanwhile your fact is my fiction, inside is out, up is down, and hope for mankind is the province of Pepsi commercials--yet the essence of all that I've told you remains, and what you must surely keep firmly in mind is the difference between shifting and often treacherous life and the death that the devil has planned..."

[Mike Handley]

"The province of Pepsi commercials" will rock me to sleep tonight. Brilliant.

[Angela]

What an glorious way to age, in a kind of gradual sublimation.  Good work.