The Devil's Diary

Entry the Fifth

How a Captured Myth Is Fought Over by Two Parties Who Have Already Lost It

The thirteenth of June, in the year 2026

Ein Teil von jener Kraft,
Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft. (A part of that power which would ever work evil, and ever works the good.) Goethe, Faust, Part One¹

I keep this leaf for a quarrel I watched scroll past, because it is the purest specimen I have collected of an act two armies do without seeing that they do it together. A picture appeared. A man your age would know stood in a garden between two pale crowned figures conjured from nothing by a machine, a borrowed dream of fantasy royalty draped over a living face.² Above it one voice declared the picture had set an enemy back a thousand years. Below it the voices gathered to fight about what the picture meant. I did not stay for the meaning. I stayed for the shape, because the shape was the lesson, and not one soul in the thread was standing where the lesson could be read.

Take first the man who planted the flag. This set them back a thousand years. A thousand. Mark the number, for it is the whole trick. It reaches for the deep time of empire, the ancient arc, the millennial weight, and it means none of it. One of the gathered asked the only question that mattered, asked the number to say what it could possibly mean, and the number could not answer.³ The grandeur was borrowed and the account was empty. A claim that wears the robes of eternity and cannot pay for a single year of them is a claim built to be felt and never weighed. The questioner punctured it with one breath, and that breath was the cleverest line said in the whole assembly, though no one thanked him for it.

Now the other who answered, the one the gathering marked as wise. This picture, he said, is the old occult mythology of the worst movement of your last century, and you cannot argue it until you first grant that a buried kingdom and its hidden masters were ever invoked toward such ends.⁴ And here I sat forward, for the man had spoken a truth and committed a robbery in the same breath, and did not feel the weight shift in his own hands. The buried kingdom he named is old beyond the movement that raided it, older than the century, carried through a hundred dreaming traditions before any tyrant reached for it.⁵ A myth does not belong to the one who steals it. Yet the man, by naming the theft as proof, handed the thief the deed. He said in effect that every pale crowned figure, every hidden city, every silver dream now flies the enemy banner, and so he ceded the whole dreaming country to the very power he meant to oppose. The thief asks for nothing more than that. Sole title to the dream is the only spoil the raider ever truly wanted.

This is the marrow of the matter, and I would have you hold it. There are not two sides in that garden. There is one captured dream and two parties quarreling over a prize both have already let slip. The flag-planter seizes the picture for his banner. The wise answerer reseizes it for the enemy banner and calls the reseizure resistance. Each performs the identical act from opposing ends, the act of pressing a living many-shaped form into a single dead allegiance, and the dream that was wide enough for a hundred meanings comes out of their hands narrow enough for one.⁶ The picture became a captured specimen the instant it landed, and stayed captured through every reply, because capturing it was the only move anyone in the thread knew how to make.

And mark the last clause the wise one wrote, for it is the finest specimen in my whole collection and I have kept the older versions of it in the leaf before this.⁷ It is not worth the effort to follow the logic. Not worth the effort. There it is, the toll booth I described to you last, raised now in the middle of an argument. He did not refute the questioner. He declined him. He announced that the labor of engaging was an unpaid burden he would not shoulder, and dressed the refusal as a standard too high to waste on the unworthy. This is the gaze that turns the troublesome to stone, the quiet expulsion that needs no argument because it withholds the argument, and it is purchased with no coin at all, only the posture of a patience too dear to spend.⁸ The one who could puncture the empty number was pre-banished by a man too weary to be punctured. The booth went up, the resister was waved off the road, and the dream stayed captured behind it.

You will ask why I prize this small quarrel above grander ruin, and I will tell you, gorgon horde, because you were in it and you are still in it and you did not notice when you took your side. Every party in that thread believed themselves to be thinking, and not one of you was. You were each running a track laid down before you arrived, the flag-reflex, the counter-flag-reflex, the weary expulsion, three grooves worn so deep that sliding down them feels exactly like having a thought.⁹ A picture appeared and the grooves did the rest, and your earworms sang, and you mistook the singing for your own voice. This is the condition I have labored your whole age to deepen, the substitution of the worn track for the live step, and the marvel of it is that it wears the face of conviction. You fought with all your hearts. You were certain you saw. You saw nothing but the groove.

For there was a reading none of them reached, and I name it only because a false ledger is useless even to me. The dream in that picture was raided, not born, in the house of the enemy. To say so as accusation locks the door the enemy wants locked. To say so as history opens it, for what was stolen can be reclaimed, and a myth named as commons is a myth walked back out of the thief’s hall into the wide country it came from.¹⁰ That reading was available to anyone in the thread who would grant each speaker a moment of good faith, build the truest version of what each was reaching toward, and only then weigh it.¹¹ The order is the whole of it. Charity first, the strongest version next, the verdict last and only if it must come. Reverse that order, leap to the verdict on a glance, and you have performed my favorite operation upon yourself, the dead copy of a thought worn smooth and mistaken for the thinking.¹²

One stone in this leaf resists me, and I set it down honestly. The wise answerer was not wholly wrong, and that is what makes the groove so deep. The buried kingdom was raided by the worst of men, and naming the raid is a real knowledge most never trouble to learn. The truth and the captured reflex rode in on the same sentence, fused so tightly the speaker could not feel where one ended. This is the cruelty of my best work. I do not need to make you ignorant. I need only let a truth arrive already pressed into a single allegiance, so that grasping the truth and surrendering the dream become one motion, and you perform them together and call it insight.

The way out is the one no one took, which is why I record it without fear of losing custom. See the whole picture, all its layers at once, the conjured image and the planted flag and the gathered quarrel, as a single specimen of capture, rather than as a battle with a side to join.¹³ The one who sees the thread entire stands where no one in the thread was standing, and from there the dream is plainly wide, the number is plainly empty, and the toll booth is plainly a booth. I am not troubled. The grooves are deep and the glance is quick and the picture was already scrolling away, and you, gorgon horde, have taken your side in the next quarrel before this leaf has dried. But my office obliges me to note that the wider reading was there the whole time, free for any soul willing to do the work the weary man declined.

Entry the fifth. A dream pressed into one meaning is a dream surrendered, and two parties fighting over the surrender are the surest proof that it is complete.